人类的思维离不开语言能力，但纯粹无差别的语言只是哲学家们的幻想。真正的语言总是以某种地方变体的形式存在：英语、纳瓦霍语、汉语、斯瓦希里语、布鲁夏斯基语，或是其他数千种语言中的一种。每一种语言都将使用者与延续数千年的传统联系起来。一旦在人类社群中习得，它便能让我们接触到浩瀚的知识和信仰：这些宝贵的财富赋予我们力量，让我们在思考、聆听、说话、阅读或写作时，都能站在先祖思想和情感的肩膀上。我们的语言将我们置于文化的连续体中，连接着过去，并将我们的意义传递给未来的同道。

Human thought is unthinkable without the faculty of language, but language pure and undifferentiated is a fantasy of philosophers. Real language is always found in some local variant: English, Navajo, Chinese, Swahili, Burushaski or one of several thousand others. And every one of these links its speakers into a tradition that has survived for thousands of years. Once learnt in a human community, it will provide access to a vast array of knowledge and belief: assets that empower us, when we think, when we listen, when we speak, read or write, to stand on the shoulders of so much ancestral thought and feeling. Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers.

这本书至关重要。它讲述的是这些传统和语言的历史。比起君主、国家或经济体，语言社群才是世界历史的真正主角。它们历经岁月洗礼，被使用者清晰而自觉地视为身份的象征，但同时也在逐渐变化，甚至随着社群对新现实的适应而分裂或融合。这种语言间的相互作用，是长期以来被忽视的历史层面。

This book is fundamental. It is about the history of those traditions, the languages. Far more than princes, states or economies, it is language-communities who are the real players in world history, persisting through the ages, clearly and consciously perceived by their speakers as symbols of identity, but nonetheless gradually changing, and perhaps splitting or even merging as the communities react to new realities. This interplay of languages is an aspect of history that has too long been neglected.

语言不仅是人类群体的旗帜和标志，也守护着我们的记忆。即使是无形的语言，也是我们保存过往知识的最有力工具，它能不断地将知识传承给下一代。任何一种人类语言都能将人类社群凝聚在一起，构建沟通网络；同时，它也赋予社群以戏剧化的形式，让我们得以讲述和铭记社群的故事。

As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups, languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten, languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories.

即使是如此鸿篇巨制，也不可能囊括所有故事。《语言帝国》聚焦于那些因种种原因脱离其发源地、传播至世界各地的语言。即便如此严格的筛选标准，将故事数量从数千个缩减至几十个，剩余的故事依然丰富多彩，令人叹为观止。某种程度上，值得讲述的故事如此之多，与其说这是一部语言版的《一千零一夜》，不如说它更像是一部语言版的《一千零一夜》。

It is not possible, even in a book as big as this one, to tell all those stories. Empires of the Word concentrates on the languages that, for one reason or another, grew out from their homes, and spread across the world. But even with such a stringent entry qualification, cutting the number of stories from many thousand to a couple of dozen, the remaining diversity is still overwhelming. In a way, there are so many tales to tell that the work is less a telling of a single story than a linguistic Thousand and One Nights.

我们将探讨苏美尔语及其在中东的后继者，直至今日阿拉伯语，在教育、文化和外交领域所取得的惊人创新；中国在两千年的外敌入侵中展现出的不可思议的韧性；梵语从北印度到爪哇和日本的奇妙传播；希腊人引人入胜的自尊心；现代欧洲语言诞生的斗争；以及很久以后，这些语言如何传播到世界各地的不可思议的细节。

We shall range over the amazing innovations, in education, culture and diplomacy, thought up by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and much later, the improbable details of how they were projected across the world.

除了这些辉煌的成就之外，语言的衰落也同样引人入胜。五世纪时，西罗马帝国被德语使用者彻底征服。这些征服为现代西欧国家的形成奠定了基础：那么，为什么德语却被遗忘了呢？在非洲，埃及语在三千多年的时间里都抵御着外来入侵：为什么在穆罕默德的阿拉伯语涌入之后，它却逐渐衰落并最终消失呢？在近代，荷兰统治东印度群岛的时间与英国统治印度的时间大致相同：那么，为什么荷兰语在现代印度尼西亚鲜为人知呢？只有解答了这些问题，我们才能真正理解英语在全球的传播。

Besides these epic achievements, language failures are no less interesting. The Western Roman Empire was thoroughly overrun by German-speakers in the fifth century. These conquests laid the basis for the countries of modem western Europe: so why did German get left behind? In Africa, Egyptian had been surviving foreign takeovers for over three millennia: why did it shrivel and disappear after the influx of Muhammad’s Arabic? And in the modern era, the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for the same period that Britain ruled India: so why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia? Until such questions are answered, the global spread of English can never be understood.

从文化层面来看，语言的兴衰更替所伴随的世界观也令人着迷。讽刺的是，拉丁语在讲希腊语和阿拉姆语的东地中海文明社会中难以立足，却迅速被高卢和西班牙的文盲所接受。在美洲，天主教传教士几个世纪以来都阻碍了西班牙语的传播，但在亚洲，福音派新教徒却对英语的普及起到了至关重要的作用。我们不妨一开始就承认，语言的吸引力和影响力之谜深不可测：讲述故事并不总是意味着理解故事本身。

On a cultural level, there is fascination too in the world-views that went with the advancing and receding languages. Ironies abound: Latin could make no headway with the sophisticates of the eastern Mediterranean, who spoke Greek and Aramaic, but it was quickly embraced by the illiterate peoples of Gaul and Spain. In the Americas, Catholic missionaries slowed for centuries the spread of Spanish, but in Asia, Evangelical Protestants turned out to be crucial to the take-up of English. We may as well admit at the outset that the mysteries of linguistic attraction and linguistic influence run deep: to tell the story is not always to understand it.

然而，我认为，对语言史进行普遍研究（本文是首次尝试）至少与历史语言学的常规研究方向一样，具有启发性和科学价值。比较罗马人和日耳曼人征服高卢对语言的影响，与比较拉丁语和日耳曼语动词系统的结构同样重要——事实上，两者之间或许存在互为因果的关系。语言的本质决定了其所定义的社群，因此，与社会研究中的大多数研究对象相比，语言提供了更为清晰的比较分析单位。然而，人们对语言社群随时间推移的兴起、发展和衰落，以及这些过程可能揭示的使用这些语言的社会类型的信息，关注不足。例如，众所周知，罗马帝国西部用拉丁语统治，东部用希腊语统治，而且希腊语统治比拉丁语统治持续了几个世纪：令人惊讶的是，当防御体系崩溃、帝国各省被占领时，拉丁语幸存了下来——并且从未被取代——而希腊语在几代人的时间里就基本消失了。

Nevertheless, I believe that the universal study of language history, of which this is a first attempt, is at least as enlightening and valid a focus for science as the more usual concerns of historical linguistics. It is as significant to compare the linguistic effects of the Roman and the Germanic conquests of Gaul as it is to compare the structures of the Latin and Germanic verb-systems—indeed just possibly one might throw some light on the other. Languages by their nature define communities, and so offer clearer units than most in social studies on which to base comparative analyses. Not enough attention has been paid to the growth, development and collapse of language communities through time, and the light these may shed on the kinds of society that spoke these languages. It is a received truth, for example, that in the Roman Empire the west was administered in Latin, the east in Greek, and the Greek administration lasted for many centuries more than the Latin: how surprising, but how revealing then, that when the time came for the defences to collapse and the Empire’s provinces to be overrun, Latin survived—and has never been replaced—but Greek largely evaporated within a couple of generations.

世界语言史能够雄辩地反映出各个民族的真实性格、过往的迁徙和变迁，也为未来提供了一些重要的启示。1898年，当被问及在近代史上哪个事件最具决定性意义时，德国首相俾斯麦回答说：“北美讲英语。” 二十世纪的历史证明了他的判断是正确的。北美主要强国两次介入始于欧洲的冲突，左右了最终的胜负，而每一次他们都站在了英语阵营一边。不仅如此，二十世纪通信、电话、电影、汽车、电视、计算机和互联网等领域的科技革命，也几乎都由讲英语的美国引领，将英语传播到世界各地，甚至远及大英帝国未曾涉足的地区。如今，一场由新媒体推动的世界语言革命似乎正在酝酿之中。

The language history of the world can be eloquent of the real character of peoples, their past movements and changes. It also offers some broad hints for the future. Asked in 1898 to choose a single defining event in recent history, the German chancellor Bismarck replied, ‘North America speaks English’. He was right, as the twentieth century showed. Twice the major powers of North America stepped in to determine the outcome of struggles that started in Europe, each time on the side of the English-speaking forces. Even more, the twentieth century’s technological revolutions in communications, telephones, films, car ownership, television, computing and the Internet, were led overwhelmingly from English-speaking America, projecting its language across the world, to parts untouched even by the British Empire. It seems almost as if a world language revolution is following on, borne by the new media.

语言的传播虽然鲜有可逆的，但也并非稳固。即使是像英语这样在二十一世纪拥有广泛基础的语言，也无法幸免。它仍然受到语言更替的古老因素的威胁：人口增长的变化、贸易模式的改变以及文化声望的提升。尽管英语近年来在技术上取得了长足的进步，但这并不能保证它在出版、广播或互联网领域长期占据主导地位。技术如同丛林法则，本身是中立的。

But though the spread of a language is seldom reversible, it is never secure. Even a language as broadly based as English is in the twenty-first century cannot be immune. It is still threatened by those old causes of language succession: changes in population growth, patterns of trade and cultural prestige. For all the recent technical mastery of English, nothing guarantees long-term pre-eminence in publishing, broadcasting or the World Wide Web. Technology, like the jungle, is neutral.

语言史本身并不能解释过去，也不能预测未来。语言传统成千上万，它们的相对规模也在动态变化。任何一种语言都可能出现重要的创新；尤其是在现代，创新传播速度可能非常快。埃及语、阿卡德语、梵语、波斯语、希腊语和拉丁语等语言，在其鼎盛时期都凭借其强大的影响力和崇高的地位而显得不可撼动。但它们最终都付出了代价，发现语言使用者群体并非总是那么感性。

Language history does not, in itself, explain the past, or predict the future. There are thousands of language traditions, and their relative sizes are changing dynamically. Important innovations can arise in any one of them; in modern conditions especially, innovations may spread fast. Languages such as Egyptian and Akkadian, Sanskrit and Persian, Greek and Latin, in their day all seemed irresistible in their dominance and their prestige. But as they found to their cost, speaker populations can be unsentimental.

语言的未来，如同语言的过去，注定充满变数。但要了解历史的全貌，辨别人类群体中真正的赢家和输家，我们就不能忽视语言斗争的结果。

The language future, like the language past, is set to be full of surprises. But to find out what has happened in history overall, the true winners and losers among human groups, we cannot ignore the outcomes of the language struggle.

小索尔兹伯里山，2004年7月28日

Little Solsbury Hill, 28 July 2004

序幕：语言的冲突

PROLOGUE: A CLASH OF LANGUAGES

1519年11月8日，埃尔南·科尔特斯率领三百名西班牙人首次觐见了墨西哥最高统治者。会面地点位于横跨湖泊、通往首都特诺奇蒂特兰的堤道上。四周环水，东方地平线上可见一座火山正在喷发。科尔特斯骑着马，蓄着胡须，身着闪亮的盔甲，这与他此前作为小镇执法官和业余淘金者的身份截然不同。莫特库索马^* ，这位生来就注定要坐上墨西哥王位、已在多场战争中凯旋的君主，被抬在轿子上，头戴饰有闪亮绿色格查尔羽毛的巨大圆形头饰，鼻子、耳朵和下唇上都佩戴着饰品，身后跟着一群身披美洲虎皮、头戴鹰羽的武士护卫。

On 8 November 1519 Hernán Cortés and a band of three hundred Spaniards met for the first time the supreme ruler of Mexico. The venue was the causeway across the lake leading to its capital city, Tenochtitlán. All around them was water. On the eastern horizon a volcano could be seen in eruption. Cortés was on horseback, bearded, in shining armour, belying his recent career as a small-town law officer and amateur gold prospector. Motecuhzoma,^* born to sit on the royal mat of Mexico and already victorious in many wars, was carried on a litter, resplendent in a vast circular headdress with plumes of lustrous green quetzal, ornaments on his nose, ears and lower lip, behind him an escort of warriors wearing jaguar hides and eagle feathers.

互赠礼物后，西班牙人被引至城内，下榻于莫特库佐马父亲曾经居住的宫殿。他们享用了火鸡、水果和玉米粽的晚餐。随后，莫特库佐马——他的正式头衔是“特拉托阿尼”（tlatoani ，意为“发言人”）——返回迎接宾客。

After an exchange of gifts, the Spaniards were led into the city, and accommodated in a palace that had been the residence of Motecuhzoma’s father. They were given a dinner of turkey, fruit and maize tamales. Then Motecuhzoma, whose official title was tlatoani, ‘speaker’, returned to greet his guests.

这是两位领袖首次直接交流他们对这场划时代会面的理解：美洲最大帝国的统治者，正值权力巅峰，与西班牙国王自封的使节面对面。这位使节虽然身处一座秩序井然、维护良好的城市，其规模远超欧洲任何城市，却依然表现得异常镇定。他们的对话奠定了之后一切的基调，尤其是阿兹特克人悲剧性的外交斡旋和不解，以及西班牙人精心策划、虚伪狡诈却又毫不妥协的侵略。这是纳瓦特尔语取代纳瓦特尔语成为墨西哥帝国官方语言的第一步，也是西班牙语逐步确立其在新大陆的地位，先是作为政府和宗教语言，然后成为其他一切领域的通用语言的第一步^。

This was the first moment when the two leaders shared directly with each other their understanding of this epoch-making encounter: the ruler of the largest empire in the Americas, still at the height of his power, coming face to face with the self-appointed emissary of the king of Spain, who, though under guard in a well-kept and well-ordered city, larger than any to be seen in Europe, was yet strangely unawed. Their words set the tone for all that was to follow, above all the tragic diplomacy and incomprehension of the Aztecs, and the calculating, dissembling, but unremitting, aggression of the Spaniards. It was the first step towards the replacement of Nahuatl as the imperial language of Mexico, and the progress of Spanish towards its establishment as the language first of government and religion and then of everything else in the New World.¹

莫特库索马用纳瓦特尔语发表了一番华丽的演讲，由科尔特斯带来的翻译人员进行翻译：一位名叫玛琳-辛的墨西哥贵族妇女将纳瓦特尔语翻译成尤卡坦玛雅语，一位名叫弗雷·杰罗尼莫·德·阿吉拉尔的西班牙神父则将玛雅语的意思翻译成西班牙语。科尔特斯随后用西班牙语作答，翻译过程反过来又重复了一遍。

Motecuhzoma opened with a flowery speech in Nahuatl, translated by the interpreters whom Cortés had brought with him: Malin-tzin, a Mexican noblewoman, rendered the Nahuatl into Yucatec Maya, and Fray Géronimo de Aguilar, a Spanish priest, conveyed the sense of the Maya into Spanish. Cortés then replied in Spanish, and the process ran in reverse.

Totēukyoe, ōtikmihiyōwiltih ōtikmoziyawiltih ^*

Totēukyoe, ōtikmihiyōwiltih ōtikmoziyawiltih^*

我们的主啊，您一定承受了多少痛苦，您一定多么疲惫啊！

Our Lord, how you must have suffered, how fatigued you must be.

这是传统的问候方式，尽管墨西哥的tlatoani很少会称呼某人为tēukyoe（“领主”）。

This was a conventional greeting, although there would have been few whom the tlatoani of all Mexico would address as tēukyoe, ‘Lordship’.

ō tlāltiteç tommahzītīko, ō īteç tommopāčiwiltīko in mātzin in motepētzin, Mešihko, ō īpan tommowetziko in mopetlatzin, in mokpaltzin, in ō ačitzinka nimitzonnopiyalīlih, in ōnimitzonnotlapiyalīlih …

你已优雅地来到人间，你已来到你的水边，你的墨西哥高地，你已来到你的垫子上，你的宝座上，我曾为你短暂地保留着它，我曾为你保留着它。

You have graciously come on earth, you have approached your water, your high place of Mexico, you have come down to your mat, your throne, which I have briefly kept for you, I who used to keep it for you.

这已经很奇怪了。莫特库索马竟然以君主管家的身份称呼科尔特斯。“因为他们都走了，你们的总督，国王们，伊兹科亚特尔，老莫特库索马，阿克萨亚卡特尔，蒂索克，阿维特索特尔，他们曾是你们领土的守护者，掌管着水源，墨西哥的高地，你们的子民正是跟随他们，追随他们前进的。” ^†

This was already strange. Motecuhzoma was addressing Cortés as a steward to his sovereign. ‘For they have gone, your governors, the kings, Itzcoatl, the old Motecuhzoma, Axayacatl, Tizoc, Ahuitzotl, who hitherto have come to be guardians of your domain, to govern the water, the high place of Mexico, they behind whom, following whom your subjects have advanced,’^†

这真是匪夷所思。莫特库佐马似乎把科尔特斯当作这片土地上早已失落的至高君王。“他们是否依然徘徊在他们留下的废墟，徘徊在他们身后的阴影中？如果他们中哪怕只有一个人能够看到并赞叹我今天所经历的一切，看到我如今在他们不知情的情况下，在我们君主缺席之时所看到的一切，该有多好。这并非幻想，并非梦境；我并非在做梦，也并非在幻想；因为我已见过你，我已凝视过你。” ^*现在他声称自己看到了某种幻象。科尔特斯想必早已认为，是命运，或是上帝，将这位墨西哥领袖交到了他的掌控之中。“因为我已渴望已久（五天，十天），渴望眺望远方，眺望你从云雾缭绕中而来的神秘之地。”所以，这就是君王们所预言的应验，你必将安然回到你的水边，你的高地，你必将回到你的席位和宝座上，你必将降临。†^太容易了：科尔特斯被他希望征服的国家的统治者视为预言中的弥赛亚。“如今这已成真，你已安然降临，你已饱经苦难，你已饱经疲惫，现在来到人间，安息吧，进入你的宫殿，舒展你的筋骨；愿我们的君王降临人间。” ^§

This was really bizarre. Motecuhzoma seemed to place Cortés as a long-lost, supreme king of this very land. ‘Do they still haunt what they have left, what is behind them? If only one of them could see and admire what has happened to me today, what I now see in the absence of our lords, unbeknown to them. It is not just a fantasy, just a dream; I am not dreaming, not fantasising; for I have seen you, I have looked upon you.’^* Now he was claiming to have had a vision of some kind. Cortes must already have been thinking that chance, or God, was delivering the Mexican leader into his power. ‘For I have long (for five days, for ten days) been anxious to look far away to the mysterious place whence you are come, in the clouds, in the mists. So this is the fulfilment of what kings have said, that you would graciously return to your water, your high place, that you would return to sit upon your mat and your throne, that you would come.’^† Too easy: Cortés was being recognised as a promised messiah, by none other than the leader of the country he hoped to conquer. ‘And now that has come true, you have graciously arrived, you have known pain, you have known weariness, now come on earth, take your rest, enter into your palace, rest your limbs; may our lords come on earth.’^§

科伊特斯很快就利用了这位墨西哥统治者表面上表现出的惊人忠诚，但他并没有像他本可以做的那样，简单地接受这种表面上的臣服。毕竟，如果他自称是重返人间的神明，阿兹特克人还能期待他做出什么进一步的举动呢？他自己的部下又会作何反应？相反，他强化了莫特库索马对他使命的神奇起源的惊叹，并略带奉承地提及这位统治者的声望已传遍四方。但科尔特斯随即强调了他自己对神明和国王的职责，并强加给对方。他甚至以一个类似布道的手势结束了谈话。

Coités was not slow to take advantage of this astounding appearance of fealty on the part of the Mexican ruler, but he did not simply accept the apparent submission to him personally, as perhaps he could have. What further behaviour, after all, might an Aztec expect of him, if he had claimed to be a returning god? And how would his own men react? Instead he reinforced Motecuhzoma’s wonderment at the miraculous origin of his mission, and wove in a little flattery at how far the ruler’s reputation must have travelled. But immediately Cortés appealed to his own duties to his own God and king as he saw them, imposing them heavily on his interlocutor. He even ended with a gesture at a sermon.

一位目击者叙述道：

An eyewitness recounts:

科尔特斯通过我们的翻译（译者，即“语言”）回复了他，这些翻译一直陪伴在他身边，特别是多阿·玛丽娜（马林-钦）。科尔特斯告诉他，他不知道该如何报答他，无论是他自己还是我们所有人，每天都受到如此多的恩惠。他还说，我们来自太阳升起的地方，我们是一位伟大君主——伟大的皇帝唐·卡洛斯的封臣和仆人，这位皇帝麾下有许多伟大的王子。科尔特斯听说了莫特库佐马的消息，也知道他是一位多么伟大的君主，所以派我们来见他，请求他让他们也像我们的皇帝和我们所有人一样皈依基督教，并希望他和他的所有封臣都能拯救他们的灵魂。科尔特斯接着说，他稍后会向他详细说明皈依基督教的具体方式，以及我们如何敬拜一位真神，这位真神是谁，还有许多其他他应该听到的好消息，就像他告诉他的使节们的那样…… ^*

Cortés replied through our interpreters [lenguas, ‘tongues’], who were always with him, especially Doõa Marina [Malin-tzin], and told him that he did not know with what to repay him, neither himself or any of us, for all the great favours received every day, and that certainly we came from where the sun rises, and we are vassals and servants of a great lord called the great emperor Don Carlos, who has subject to him many great princes, and that having news of Motecuhzoma and of what a great lord he is, he sent us here to see him and ask him that they should be Christians, as is our emperor and are we all, and that he and all his vassals would save their souls. He went on to say that presently he would declare to him more of how and in what manner it must be, and how we worship a single true God, and who he is, and many other good things he should hear, as he had told his ambassadors …^*

这段纳瓦特尔语和西班牙语的交流记录了一个具有决定性意义的时刻，它为一种语言社群入侵另一种语言社群奠定了基础。这段历史在双方都有详尽的记载，但这并非个例。这种具有致命影响的先驱时刻在人类历史上屡见不鲜：例如，1770年7月11日，英国皇家海军的詹姆斯·库克船长在如今昆士兰北部地区遇到了讲古古伊米迪尔语的澳大利亚土著居民；又如，公元1世纪，一位名叫考迪尼亚的南印度人在柬埔寨的布南登陆，不久便迎娶了当地女王索玛（或如中国史料中记载的柳叶），从而将梵语文化带到了东南亚。

This exchange in Nahuatl and Spanish records a moment of destiny when the pattern was set for the irruption of one language community into another. It happens to be exceedingly well documented on both sides, but it is not unique. These pioneer moments of fatal impact have happened throughout human history: as when, on 11 July 1770, Captain James Cook of Great Britain’s Royal Navy encountered Australian aboriginals speaking Guugu Yimidhirr in what is now the north of Queensland; or in the first century AD, when a South Indian named Kaundinya came ashore at Bnam in Cambodia, and soon married its queen, called Soma (or Liuye, ‘Willow-Leaf’, in the Chinese report), so transplanting Sanskrit culture into South-East Asia.

本书追溯了在人类历史现阶段中传播最广的几种语言的历史。由于种种原因，使用这些语言的社群能够说服其他人加入，从而得以扩张。这种说服的动机多种多样，包括军事统治、对繁荣的渴望、宗教皈依、就读寄宿学校、服兵役等等。但归根结底，这种说服是语言传播的唯一途径，而且绝非易事，任何曾经刻意学习过其他语言的人都深有体会。

This book traces the history of those languages which, in the part of human history that we now know, have spread most widely. Somehow, and for a variety of reasons, the communities that spoke them were able to persuade others to join them, and so they expanded. The motives for that persuasion can be very diverse—including military domination, hopes of prosperity, religious conversion, attendance at a boarding school, service in an army, and many others beside. But at root this persuasion is the only way that a language can spread, and it is no small thing, as anyone who has ever tried deliberately to learn another language knows.

^*更广为人知的名字是蒙特祖玛（Montezuma）的讹误形式。其发音为moteukzoma。

^* Better known in the corrupted form Montezuma. Phonetically, it was moteukzoma.

^*每一章都采用了一种方便的罗马化拼写方式，既能准确表达不熟悉语言片段的发音，又不会与非语言学家对罗马字母发音的理解相差太远。一般来说，元音的发音与西班牙语相同，辅音和辅音群的发音与英语相同，任何特殊情况都会在第一个脚注中说明。这里，纳瓦特尔语没有采用传统的（类似西班牙语的）罗马化方式：č 代表英语的 ch，š 代表英语的 sh；h 用于表示喉塞音，类似于英语和苏格兰语中苏格兰语发音中不发音的 t；这里的 z 更接近英语的 s 而不是 z。长元音带有长音符号：ā、ē 等。常用词可以简化：例如，严格来说，它是tlahloāni。

^* In each chapter, a convenient form of romanised spelling has been adopted, to do justice to the pronunciation of fragments of an unfamiliar language, while not diverging too far from non-linguists’ ideas of how the Roman alphabet is pronounced. In general, vowels are to be pronounced pure and simple, as in Spanish, consonants and clusters as in English, and any peculiarities are announced in the first footnote. Here, for Nahuatl, the traditional (Spanish-like) romanisation has not been followed: instead, č represents English ch, and š English sh; h is used for the glottal stop, like the unheard t in the English and Scots pronunciation of Scotland; z here is closer to English s than z. Long vowels have a macron: ā, ē, … Common words may be simplified: e.g., stricty, it is tlahloāni.

^† Ka ōyahkeh motēčīuhkāwān、在 tlahtohkeh、在 Ilzkōwātzin、在 wēweh Motēukzoma、在 Āšāyaka、在 Tizōzik、在 Āwltzōtl、在 ō kuēl ačīk mitzommotlaplyalīlikoh、在 ōkipačōkoh 在 ātl 在 tepetl Mešihko，在 īnkuitlapan，īntepotzko 在 ōwayetiyā 在 momāzēwaltzin。

^† Ka ōyahkeh motēčīuhkāwān, in tlahtohkeh, in Ilzkōwātzin, in wēweh Motēukzoma, in Āšāyaka, in Tizōzik, in Āwltzōtl, in ō kuēl ačīk mitzommotlaplyalīlikoh, in ōkipačōkoh in ātl in tepetl in Mešihko, in īnkuitlapan, īntepotzko in ōwalyetiyā in momāzēwaltzin.

^* Kuix ok wāllamatih 在 īmonihka，在 intepotzko？ Mā zēmeh yehwantin kitztiyānih、kimāwizzōtiānih in nehwātl in axkān nopan omočīuh、ye nikitta、zā īmonihka īntepotzko totēukyōwān。 Kamo zan nitēmiki、ahmō zan nikočitlēwa、ahmō zan nikkočitta、ahmō zan niklēmiki、ka yē ōnimitznottili、mīštzinko ōnitlačiš。

^* Kuix ok wāllamatih in īmonihka, in intepotzko? Mā zēmeh yehwāntin kitztiyānih, kimāwizzōtiānih in nehwātl in āxkān nopan ōmočīuh, in ye nikitta, in zā īmonihka īntepotzko totēukyōwān. Kamo zan nitēmiki, ahmō zan nikočitlēwa, ahmō zan nikkočitta, ahmō zan niklēmiki, ka yē ōnimitznottili, mīštzinko ōnitlačiš.

^† Ka ōnnonēntlamattikaatka in ye mākuil, in ye mahtlāk, in ōmpa nonitztikah in kēnamihkān in atimokīštīko in mištitlan, in ayauhtitlan. Anka yehwātl 在 tlahtohkeh 中的 ki tēnēuhtiwih、在 matzin 中的 tikmomačitikiuh、在 motepētzin 中、在 īpan timowetzītīkiuh 中、在 mpetlazin 中、在 mokpaltzin 中、在 tiwalmowīkaz 中。

^† Ka ōnnonēntlamattikaatka in ye mākuil, in ye mahtlāk, in ōmpa nonitztikah in kēnamihkān in ātimokīštīko in mištitlan, in ayauhtitlan. Anka yehwātl in in ki tēnēuhtiwih in tlahtohkeh, in tikmomačitikiuh in mātzin, in motepētzin, in īpan timowetzītīkiuh in mpetlazin, in mokpaltzin, in tiwālmowīkaz.

^§ Auh in āškān ka ōneltik, ōtiwalmowīkak, ōtikmihiyōwihi, ōtikmoziyawiltih, mā tlāltiteč šimahšīti, mā šimozēwihtzino, mā šokommomačiti in motēkpankaltzin, mā xikmozēwili in monakayōlzin，mā tlāltiteč mahšitikan in totēukyōwān。

^* Cortés le respondió con nuestras lenguas, que consigo siempre estaban, especial la dona Marina, y le dijo que no sabe con qué pagar él ni todos las grandes Mercedes recibidas de cada día, y que ciertamente veníamos de donde sale el el sol, y somos瓦萨洛斯和大皇帝卡洛斯的大皇帝的瓦萨洛斯和克里亚多斯，这一切都是伟大的原则，是大人物的注意事项，我们不羡慕与肖恩·克里斯蒂亚诺斯有关的一切，科摩斯努埃斯特罗Emperador y todos nosotros, e que salvarán sus ánimas él y todos sus vasallos, e que adelante le declarará más cómo e de qué manera ha de ser, y como adoramos a un alone Dios verdadero, y quién es, y otras muchas cosas buenas que oirá,与大使 Tendile 和 Pitalpitoque 和 Quintalvor 一起在竞技场上度过了愉快的时光。（迪亚兹·德尔·卡斯蒂略，lxxxix）

^* Cortés le respondió con nuestras lenguas, que consigo siempre estaban, especial la dona Marina, y le dijo que no sabe con qué pagar él ni todos nosotros las grandes mercedes recibidas de cada día, y que ciertamente veníamos de donde sale el sol, y somos vasallos y criados de un gran senor que se dice el gran emperador don Carlos, que tiene sujetos a sí muchos y grandes príncipes, y que teniendo noticia de él y de cuán gran seõor es, nos envió a estas partes a le ver a rogar que sean cristianos, como es nuestro emperador y todos nosotros, e que salvarán sus ánimas él y todos sus vasallos, e que adelante le declarará más cómo e de qué manera ha de ser, y como adoramos a un solo Dios verdadero, y quién es, y otras muchas cosas buenas que oirá, como les había dicho a sus embajadores Tendile e Pitalpitoque e Quintalvor cuando estábamos en los arenales. (Díaz del Castillo, lxxxix)

第一部分

语言历史的本质

PART I

THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE HISTORY

薛西斯王允许地米斯托克利自由地谈论希腊事务。地米斯托克利回答说，人的言语如同华丽的地毯，只有展开才能展现其图案；地毯折叠起来，图案便会模糊不清，最终消失；因此他请求给予一些时间。国王很喜欢这个比喻，让他慢慢来；于是他请求一年的时间。之后，他充分学习了波斯语，便独自与国王交谈……

[King Xerxes] gave Themistocles leave to speak his mind freely on Greek affairs. Themistocles replied that the speech of man was like rich carpets, the patterns of which can only be shown by spreading them out; when the carpets are folded up, the patterns are obscured and lost; and therefore he asked for time. The king was pleased with the simile, and told him to take his time; and so he asked for a year. Then, having learnt the Persian language sufficiently, he spoke with the king on his own …

普鲁塔克，《地米斯托克利》，29.5

Plutarch, Themistocles, 29.5

1

忒弥斯托克利的地毯

1

Themistocles’ Carpet

语言视角下的人类历史

The language view of human history

从语言学的角度来看，目前世界人口不是六十亿，而是六千多亿。

From the language point of view, the present population of the world is not six billion, but something over six thousand.

当今世界大约有六七千个以其第一语言为标志的语言社群。这些社群的规模并不相同。从拥有约9亿使用者的汉语普通话（占世界总人口的六分之一）到英语和西班牙语（各约3亿使用者），再到数量庞大的小型语言社群，不一而足：例如，世界上超过一半的语言使用者不足5000人，还有一千多种语言的使用者不足12人。对于语言而言，这是一个岌岌可危的时代。

There are between six and seven thousand communities in the world today identified by the first language that they speak. They are not of equal weight. They range in size from Mandarin Chinese with some 900 million speakers, alone accounting for one sixth of all the people in the world, followed by English and Spanish with approximately 300 million apiece, to a long tail of tiny communities: over half the languages in the world, for example, have fewer than five thousand speakers, and over a thousand languages have under a dozen. This is a parlous time for languages.

在考察人类历史时，语言社群是一个非常自然的单元。语言作为交流工具，其本质决定了人类的划分：只有通过共同的语言，一群人才能协同行动，从而拥有共同的历史。此外，群体共享的语言正是他们共同历史记忆得以传承的媒介。语言既使共同历史的延续成为可能，也使讲述共同历史成为可能。

In considering human history, the language community is a very natural unit. Languages, by their nature as means of communication, divide humanity into groups: only through a common language can a group of people act in concert, and therefore have a common history. Moreover the language that a group shares is precisely the medium in which memories of their joint history can be shared. Languages make possible both the living of a common history, and also the telling of it.

每一种语言都具备另一个特点，使其成为保存一个群体历史的最佳媒介。每一种语言都由年轻人从老年人那里学习，因此每一种鲜活的语言都是一种传统的化身。这种传统原则上是永恒的。语言会随着代代相传而变化，但这种传承过程并不会导致语言的衰落或消亡。如同生命本身，每一代人都能重新获得语言的馈赠。因此，语言，与使用它们的民族不同，永远不会衰败或消亡。

And every language possesses another feature, which makes it the readiest medium for preserving a group’s history. Every language is learnt by the young from the old, so that every living language is the embodiment of a tradition. That tradition is in principle immortal. Languages change, as they pass from the lips of one generation to the next, but there is nothing about this process of transmission which makes for decay or extinction. Like life itself, each new generation can receive the gift of its language afresh. And so it is that languages, unlike any of the people who speak them, need never grow infirm, or die.

每种语言都有可能永存，但这并不意味着它会永远存在。基因及其编码的物种也具有永生性；但物种灭绝在古生物学中却是司空见惯的现象。同样，语言社群的实际寿命也千差万别。语言史册上充斥着消亡的语言、终结的传统，最终无人再提及。

Every language has a chance of immortality, but this is not to say that it will survive for ever. Genes too, and the species they encode, are immortal; but extinctions are a commonplace of palaeontology. Likewise, the actual lifespans of language communities vary enormously. The annals of language history are full of languages that have died out, traditions that have come to an end, leaving no speakers at all.

语言史观与基因史观形成鲜明对比，后者正在彻底改变我们对遥远过去的认知。如同生物物种和母系血统的成员资格一样，语言社群的成员资格也基于明确的亲缘关系。如果一个人能够与该物种的其他成员繁衍后代，那么他就是该物种的成员；如果一个人的母亲属于某个母系血统，那么他就是该母系血统的成员。同样，从最基本的层面来说，如果你会使用某个语言，那么你就是该语言社群的成员。

The language point of view on history can be contrasted with the genetic approach to human history, which is currently revolutionising our view of our distant past. Like membership in a biological species and a matrilineal lineage, membership in a language community is based on a clear relation. An individual is a member of a species if it can have offspring with other members of the species, and of a matrilineal lineage if its mother is in that lineage. Likewise, at the most basic level, you are a member of a language community if you can use its language.

这种以语言学定义的单元的优势在于，它必然定义了一个对我们人类而言至关重要的社群。物种单元很有趣，它定义了我们与直立人和尼安德特人等相关群体的史前关系，但随着智人的出现，它的实用性让位于一个显而易见的事实：从物种的角度来看，我们都属于同一个群体。谱系单元也有其价值，它通过线粒体DNA和Y染色体清晰地标记了漫长的岁月，如果某个谱系在当今人群中清晰可见，但在被提出的祖先候选群体中却缺失，那么谱系单元就能为人群的起源提供有趣的证据。因此，有人推断波利尼西亚人不可能来自南美洲，大多数欧洲人的祖先并非来自近东的农业起源地，而英格兰中部地区大多数人口的祖先来自弗里斯兰。¹但是，知道许多人的母亲或父亲下落不明，并不能像语言那样对整个群体施加限制。

The advantage of this linguistically defined unit is that it necessarily defines a community that is important to us as human beings. The species unit is interesting, in defining our prehistoric relations with related groups such as Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, but after the rise of Homo sapiens its usefulness yields to the evident fact that, species-wise, we are all in this together. The lineage unit too has its points, clearly marked down the aeons as it is by mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes, and can yield interesting evidence on the origin of populations if some lineage clearly present today in the population is missing in one of the candidate groups put forward as ancestors. So it has been inferred that Polynesians could not have come from South America, that most of the European population have parentage away from the Near Eastern sources of agriculture, and that the ancestry of most of the population of the English Midlands is from Friesland.¹ But knowing that many people’s mothers, or fathers, are unaccounted for does not put a bound on a group as a whole in the way that language does.

与种族这样的概念单元形成对比，种族的边界仅仅由一系列选定的特征来界定，无论是19世纪和20世纪初基于肤色或颅骨比例等表面相似性，还是近年来基于血型、组织类型和DNA序列。同样，定义其文化对应物——民族——也存在着难以克服的难题，这涉及到对共同历史的意识，或许还有共同语言等更难以捉摸的因素。鉴于许多特征会随着世代更迭而转移到不同的个体身上，因此，如何理解任何种族或民族的特征集合仍然悬而未决。^*^但使用某种语言是无可否认的普遍现象；最重要的是，它是所有已知人类群体的特征，并且代代相传。它为将人类历史划分为有意义的群体提供了一个通用的钥匙。

Contrast a unit such as a race, whose boundaries are defined by nothing more than a chosen set of properties, whether as in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by superficial resemblances such as skin colour or cranial proportions, or more recently by blood and tissue groups and sequences of DNA. Likewise, there are insurmountable problems in defining its cultural analogue, the nation, which entail the further imponderables of a consciousness of shared history, and perhaps shared language too.² Given that so many of the properties get shuffled on to different individuals in different generations, it remains moot as to what to make of any set of characteristics for a race or a nation.^* But use of a given language is an undeniable functioning reality everywhere; above all, it is characteristic of every human group known, and persistent over generations. It provides a universal key for dividing human history into meaningful groups.

诚然，语言社群比物种或血统更为分散：语言的变化速度远超DNA序列，甚至无法确定它是否总能代代相传。有些孩子长大后说的语言与父母的语言截然不同。正如我们即将看到的，语言社群的数量并非总是易于统计或可靠区分。但它们无疑是人类生存状态中真实存在的特征。

Admittedly, a language community is a more diffuse unit than a species or a lineage: a language changes much faster than a DNA sequence, and one cannot even be sure that it will always be transmitted from one generation to the next. Some children grow up speaking a language other than their parents’. As we shall soon see, language communities are not always easy to count, or to distinguish reliably. But they are undeniably real features of the human condition.

本书旨在梳理一些流传最广、在历史时期遍布世界各地、人口最为众多的语言传统的发展历程。我们将目光聚焦于那些拥有直接文字记载的语言历史，这意味着我们将忽略一些最古老的语言传播，例如班图语在南部非洲的传播，或是波利尼西亚语在太平洋的传播；但即便如此，这些语言的历史几乎都跨越了数千年。从语言的角度来看待人类历史，无疑是一幅宏大的画卷。

The task of this book is to chart some of the histories of the language traditions that have come to be most populous, ones that have spread themselves in the historic period over vast areas of the inhabited world. Our view will be restricted to language histories for which there is direct written evidence, and this means omitting some of the most ancient, such as the spread of Bantu across southern Africa, or of the Polynesian languages across the Pacific; but nevertheless the tale is almost always one that covers millennia. The history of humanity seen from its languages is a long view.

自然状态

The state of nature

数十万年来，语言一直是人类社群的通用语言，而典型的语言社群自然也在这段时间里发生了变化。人们普遍认为，在农业被发现和发展之前，人类社群是由小群体组成的，就像如今残存的狩猎采集群体一样。这些群体都有自己的语言，以及由长者传授给年轻人的古老知识和故事。无论人类居住在哪里，当时的人口密度都远低于今天。历史语言学的一个普遍观点是，当群体间停止接触时，相关的语言就会分化，因此我们也可以推断，在早期，每个自给自足的社群，即使只有几千人，也大多拥有自己的语言。

Languages have been the currency of human communities for hundreds of thousands of years, and naturally the typical language community has changed in that time. The presumption is that before the discovery and expansion of agriculture, human communities were small bands, just as the remaining groupings of hunter-gatherers are to this day. These groups all have languages, and ancient lore and stories which the old retail to the young. The density of the human population, wherever people were living, would have been far less than it is today. It is a commonplace of historical linguistics that related languages diverge when contact ceases between groups, so we can also presume that in this early period each self-sufficient community, of up to a few thousand people, would by and large have had its own language.

这一切在那些以畜牧和农业为基础、采取定居生活方式的社群中发生了改变。社群规模更大，组织性也更强。在定居社群中，一年的邻居会在接下来的许多年，甚至几代人的时间里继续保持联系。人们可能需要缴纳税款，并与上级政府进行协商。节日和集市将来自四面八方的人们聚集在一起。民兵组织会成立，以保卫当地社群，并掠夺那些被认为较弱的社群。人们开始有动力进行远距离交流。双语人口比例上升，各种语言的使用人数也会增加；但语言的绝对数量很可能有所下降，较小的社群会因为战争、通婚、逃亡，或者仅仅是出于务实的考虑而使用其他语言。

All this changed in communities that adopted a settled way of life, based on herding and agriculture. Now communities would have become both larger and more organised. In settled communities, one’s neighbours in one year would remain one’s neighbours for many years, indeed generations, to come. One might have dues to pay, and negotiate, with higher authorities. Festivals, and markets, would bring together people from a wide area. Militias would be raised to defend local communities, and to steal from others perceived to be weaker. There began to be a motive for communication among people over longer distances. Bilingualism would have increased in the population, and also languages would have grown in terms of the number of speakers; quite likely, too, the absolute number of languages would have fallen, smaller communities losing speakers through war, marriage or desertion, or simply a pragmatic tendency to use other people’s languages.

从局势变化本身的性质来看，我们本可以推断出这些过程。但事实上，我们能够亲眼目睹这些过程。在过去几代人的巴布亚新几内亚，随着村庄和聚落中原有的自给自足的生活方式逐渐被更广泛的全国性生活方式所取代，这些过程在加速发展中得到了体现。这一转变的一个特征是许多本土语言的衰落，以及邻近语言的扩张，或者更广泛地说，是与国家层面的贸易或政府相关的语言的取代：实用术语或皮钦语迅速演变为通用的克里奥尔语，并在大量使用者中非正式但有效地实现了标准化。

From the very nature of the changing situation we could have inferred these processes. But in fact it has been possible to watch them. They have been observed in accelerated development in the last couple of generations in Papua New Guinea, as the old self-sufficient ways of life in villages and hamlets yield to a wider-ranging national way of life. A feature of this transition is the decline of many of the indigenous languages and their replacement through the expansion of neighbouring tongues, or more globally by languages associated with trade at the national level, or government: utility jargons or pidgins are quickly transformed into general-purpose Creole languages, informally but effectively standardised across vast numbers of speakers.

识字能力与语言史的开端

Literacy and the beginning of language history

只要有讲故事、判决和疗愈仪式，就会有语言记录，这些记录以口头形式保存在社群中博学之士的记忆中。老人们的头脑是一笔宝贵的财富，其中充满了歌曲、先例、技艺、地图、食谱和历史。

As long as there has been storytelling, and the dispensing of legal judgments and healing rituals, there have been linguistic records, retained verbally in the memories of learned members of the community. The minds of the old are a weighty resource, filled with songs and precedents, skills and maps, recipes and histories.

但口述学习始终带有主观性，而且记忆量也存在实际限制——除非能组织起互补的记录团队。此外，从现代历史学家的时代错置视角来看，记忆中保存的古代记录总是存在不真实性的倾向。在使用过程中，人们总是会面临逐步更新这些记录以适应当代世界需求的压力：否则，随着社会制度和语言的逐渐变化，真正的古代记录往往会变得既不相关又难以理解。即使在今天，当口述传统得以完整保存时，也很难从记忆者的证词中获得关于过去的清晰明确的信息。回忆是一种有条不紊的重新想象，而遥远的过去可能超出了任何人的理解范围。

But there was always a subjective element in learning derived from recitation, as well as a practical limit on the amount that could be retained—unless perhaps complementary teams of record-keepers could be organised. Moreover, speaking now from the anachronistic point of view of the modern historian, there would always be a tendency to inauthenticity in ancient records held in memory. In use, there was always a pressure to update them little by little to meet the needs of the contemporary world: otherwise, as gradual changes accumulate in social institutions and in the language too, really ancient records would tend to become both irrelevant and incomprehensible. Even today, when oral traditions can be found intact, it is seldom possible to gain clear, unambiguous information about the past from the testimony of rememberers. Recall is an act of disciplined reimagination, and the remote past may be beyond anyone’s ken.

这一切都通过文字的奇迹得以解决。文字传统通常起源于某种记账过程——至少计数和标记往往是现存最早的书面文件的清晰雏形——其目的是为了客观地证明某些交易涉及的数量。但随着实践的深入，人们逐渐意识到符号原则上能够记录任何信息，并且随着对符号运用能力的提高，它们甚至可以作为流利口语的直接记忆辅助工具。

All this is resolved through the miracle of writing. Writing traditions usually begin in some kind of process of accounting records—at least tallies and tokens are often the earliest clear predecessors of written documents to survive—the intent being to provide objective proof of the quantities involved in some transaction. But with practice it often became clear that the symbols were in principle capable of recording any message, and as facility in handling the symbols grew they became usable as a direct aide-mémoire even for fluent speech.

一旦一个文化拥有了文字记录，最初的痕迹便开始留下，这些痕迹日后将使我们能够书写该语言的历史。如果文字系统与口语有着清晰的联系（尽管通常符号起源于数字和概念，但实际上，如果不参考口语词汇，就不可能发展出一套功能完善的文字系统），那么那些无声的石碑、泥板或保存完好的兽皮——无论是什么——都会开始向我们揭示一些我们原本以为转瞬即逝的东西——几千年前，人们是如何实际说这种语言的^。

Once a culture has written documents, the first traces begin to be laid down which will later enable the history of the language to be written. If the writing system has a clear link to the language as spoken (and, despite the usual symbolic start in numbers and concepts, in practice it is impossible to develop a fully functional writing system without reference to words in spoken language), then the mute stones or clay tablets or preserved animal skins—whatever—begin to reveal to us something we might have thought quite evanescent—how the language was actually spoken, perhaps thousands of years ago.^*

我们将要探讨的所有语言，其文字历史都可追溯到一千多年前，有的甚至长达两三倍。几乎在所有情况下，读写能力都是从外来者或邻近语言那里习得的，之后逐渐融入到该语言自身的传统之中。事实上，除了汉语之外，即使是那些最早发明文字并开始使用文字的语言，也都放弃了原有的文字系统，转而采用了其他系统^。

All the languages whose careers we shall consider have written histories that extend back over a thousand years, and sometimes two or three times this long. In almost every case, literacy is a skill that was learnt from visitors or neighbours, and then became part of a language’s own tradition. As it happens, with the exception of Chinese, even the languages that originated writing, and so made the earliest use of it, have dropped their original system, and borrowed another,^†

语言的历史发展历程如同它们各自为使用者创造的世界一样丰富多彩。它们的命运也截然不同：有些语言（如梵语或阿拉姆语）发展到拥有遍布广袤地区的使用者，但最终却走向衰落；有些语言（如高加索或巴布亚的语言）在与世隔绝的避难所中顽强地生存下来；还有一些语言的使用者则逐渐被截然不同的传统所取代（例如北美洲、南美洲、非洲和澳大利亚的许多地区）。有些语言（如埃及语和汉语）在单一的地域内保持了数千年的使用者和传统，抵御了所有入侵者；另一些语言（如希腊语和拉丁语）则通过军事入侵传播，但最终还是被新的入侵者所取代。

The past careers of languages are as diverse as the worlds that each language has created for its speakers. They have suffered very different fates: some (like Sanskrit or Aramaic) growing to have speaker populations distributed across vast tracts, but ultimately shrinking to insignificance; others (such as the languages of the Caucasus or Papua) twinkling steadily in inaccessible refuges; others still yielding up their speakers to quite different traditions (as in so many parts of North and South America, Africa and Australia). Some (such as Egyptian and Chinese) maintained their speakers and their traditions for thousands of years in a single territory, defying all invaders; others (such as Greek and Latin) spread by military invasion, but ultimately lost ground to new invaders.

一种传统往往会依附于另一种传统，最终取而代之。一种主要语言寄生于另一种语言，并迅速接管其世代积累的传播渠道。这在各个时代和各个大陆的帝国更迭中都是一种常见的伎俩：波斯的阿拉姆语充分利用了七世纪吕底亚语在小亚细亚建立的传播网络；十六世纪，西班牙语篡夺了阿兹特克人和印加人的语言，并用它们统治墨西哥和秘鲁；在英属印度的早期，英语和乌尔都语也进入了以波斯语构建的权力结构。但这些命运变迁所经历的时间尺度却千差万别：短短十年便可能奠定未来千年的格局，例如亚历山大从波斯人手中夺取东地中海；或者某种特定的趋势也可能在数千年间，一点一滴、一望无际、一村一村地逐渐形成：汉语在东亚的传播正是如此。

Often enough, one tradition has piggybacked on another, ultimately supplanting it. One big language parasitises another, and in a coup de main takes over the channels built up over generations. This is a common trick as empires succeed one another, in every time and continent: Persia’s Aramaic made good use of the networks established for Lydian in seventh-century Asia Minor; in the sixteenth century, Spanish usurped the languages of the Aztecs and Incas, using them to rule in Mexico and Peru; and in the early days of British India, English and Urdu gained access to power structures built in Persian. But the timescale on which these changing fortunes have been played out is astonishingly varied: a single decade may set the pattern for a thousand years to follow, as when Alexander took over the eastern Mediterranean from the Persians; or a particular trend may assert itself little by little, mile by mile, village by village, over thousands of years: just so did Chinese percolate in East Asia.

这意味着，尽管语言的历史纷繁复杂，但它仍然能够让我们深入了解突发变化带来的长期影响。尤其是在当今国家间沟通方式发生变化的情况下，这一点更为重要。

This means that, for all its bewildering variety, this history told through languages can give an insight into the long-term effects of sudden changes. This is true especially where what is changing is how nation shall speak unto nation, as it is today.

事实上，文化接触对语言产生的复杂影响，才是真正影响的最佳记录：与那些基于军事征服或商业霸权的常见分析形成鲜明对比，后者或许能提供一种虚假的清晰感。公元五世纪，日耳曼部落闪电般征服西罗马帝国究竟有多彻底？尽管这场征服彻底改变了所有君主的统治，但法国、西班牙和意大利北部仍然在使用拉丁语的各种变体，而且一直延续至今。公元前七世纪的亚述究竟发生了什么？当时统治者的统治地位稳固，新的征服仍在继续：然而，与此同时，亚述的语言却在不断变化，从统治者古老的语言阿卡德语，转变为据称被其征服的游牧民族的语言阿拉米语。

In fact, the complex effects on languages when cultures come into contact is the best record we have of real influence: contrast the more familiar analyses based on military conquest or commercial dominance, which may offer a quite spurious clarity. How thoroughgoing was the Germanic tribes’ lightning conquest of the western Roman empire in the fifth century AD? Though it changed for good all the crowned heads, it left France, Spain and northern Italy still speaking variations of Latin, and they have gone on doing so to this day. What was really happening in Assyria in the seventh century BC? It was a period when the rulers’ ascendancy was assured and new conquests were being made: yet all the while its language was changing from Akkadian, the age-old language of its rulers, to Aramaic, the language of the nomads it was reputedly conquering.

世界语言史展现了过去民族迁徙和变迁的更多真实影响，远非那些大多自封的领袖们所宣称的那样。它揭示了文化关系与权力政治和经济利益之间微妙的交织。

The language history of the world shows more of the true impacts of past movements and changes of peoples, beyond the heraldic claims of their largely self-appointed leaders. They reveal a subtle interweave of cultural relations with power politics and economic expediency.

它还为未来提供了一些宏观的启示。它强烈暗示，任何语言的传播最终都无法保证：即使是21世纪使用人数最多的语言，最终也会受到语言传承旧有决定因素或过去五百年甚至五十年间出现的新因素的影响。移民、人口增长、教育和交流技术的变革——所有这些都在改变着世界各地语言身份的平衡，而随着世界经济适应新兴财富中心的崛起，声望和抱负的焦点也在不断变化。未来的情况或许前所未有，语言有可能真正实现全球通用，但它们仍然是人类的产物。而人类很少能长期保持团结。

It also offers some broad hints for the future. It suggests rather strongly that no language spread is ultimately secure: even the largest languages in the twenty-first century will be subject either to the old determinants of language succession or some new ones that have arisen in the last five hundred years or the last fifty. Migrations, population growth, changing techniques of education and communication—all shift the balance of language identities across the world, while the focus of prestige and aspiration varies as the world’s economies adjust to the rise of new centres of wealth. Future situations may well be unprecedented, with potential for languages to achieve truly global use, but they will still be human. And human beings seldom stay united for long.

一段内在的历史

An inward history too

但我们可以期待世界语言史以另一种方式揭示真相。一个语言社群并非仅仅是一个以使用特定语言为标志的群体：它本身就是一个不断演进的共同体，其独特的世界观深受共同语言传统的影响。一种语言承载着大量的感知、陈词滥调、判断和灵感。因此，从某种意义上说，当一种语言取代另一种语言时，一个民族的世界观也必然随之改变。

But we can expect the language history of the world to be revealing in another way. A language community is not just a group marked out by its use of a particular language: it is an evolving communion in its own right, whose particular view of the world is informed by a common language tradition. A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, clichés, judgements and inspirations. In some sense, then, when one language replaces another, a people’s view of the world must also be changing.

因此，当我们考察那些在地球上扩张和收缩的大型有影响力的语言社群的外部历史时，我们也将尝试展现使用这些语言的社群的内在感受的一些方面。

So as we survey the outward history of the large and influential language communities, in their expansions and retrenchments across the face of the earth, we shall also try to show some aspects of the inward sense of the communities who spoke the languages.

这很难用语言表达，或许最难的就是用语言本身来表达。正如维特根斯坦所说，我的语言的界限就是我的世界的界限；他认为，这些界限只能间接地暗示，而不能明确地陈述。本书试图通过各种间接的方式——并大量运用翻译——来展现一种语言在使用者增减的过程中所塑造的某种精神气质。

This is something that is very difficult to express, most difficult of all perhaps in the language itself. As Wittgenstein remarked, the limits of my language are the limits of my world; and these limits, he felt, could only be indicated indirectly, never stated explicitly. This book attempts in various indirect ways—and with copious use of translation—to show something of the temper of mind that was conditioned by a language, even as it gained or lost speakers.

这是一项危险的尝试，但至关重要，因为只有这样，人类文化中曾经占据主导地位的语言更迭的意义才不会仅仅停留在时间顺序表上的一串名称和日期。本书的论点之一是，当一代人开始说一种与父母不同的语言时，其中蕴含着比忠诚更为微妙的东西的交流。

It is a dangerous undertaking, but it is crucial if the succession of languages which have dominated human cultures is to have more meaning than the mere list of names and dates in a chronology. It is part of the contention of this book that there is an exchange of something far more subtle than an allegiance when one generation comes to speak a language other than its parents’.

我们可以通过比较莫特库索马和科尔特斯的演讲风格（而非内容）来初步了解这可能是什么。他们的语言，纳瓦特尔语和西班牙语，彼此截然不同，这种差异让人联想到个人的特征。最明显的是，正如每个人都有自己独特的声音一样，每种语言也有其独特的语音系统或音系。例如，“你的墨西哥城”这个短语，在纳瓦特尔语中是in mātzin in motepētzin, Mešihko，在西班牙语中是Su ciudad de México。纳瓦特尔语中的这个短语使用了 tz 音（类似于英语bits中的 tz ），而西班牙语中没有这个音；同样，ciudad 的开头也有一个 θ 音（类似于英语thin中的 θ ），而纳瓦特尔语中也没有这个音。即使西班牙语试图直接模仿纳瓦特尔语，例如墨西哥（发音为 MEH-shi-ko）这个名字，它也未能捕捉到喉塞音，即Mēšihko中的 h ，这听起来可能更像是现代英语中拼写为 Meshítko 的单词。

We can get a first inkling of what that might be by comparing more for style than substance those speeches of Motecuhzoma and Cortés. Their languages, Nahuatl and Spanish, are quite distinct from one another, in ways that recall the traits of individual people. Most obviously, just as each person has a recognisable voice, each language has its own sound system or phonology. Consider the phrase ‘your city of Mexico’, in Nahuatl in mātzin in motepētzin, Mešihko, in Spanish Su ciudad de México. The phrase in Nahuatl uses a sound, tz (as in English bits), which is not used in Spanish, just as ciudad begins with a sound, θ (as in English thin), which is absent from Nahuatl. And even where Spanish was attempting to imitate Nahuatl directly, as in the name of México (pronounced MEH-shi-ko), it failed to capture the glottal stop, written with an h in Mēšihko, which probably sounded more like a word that would be spelt in modern English as Meshítko.

但是，两种语言在构成更长单词和句子时的组合规则也截然不同。例如，西班牙语在句首使用“Su ”表示“你的”，而纳瓦特尔语则通过在每个单词末尾添加“tzin”来表达敬意。同样，纳瓦特尔语中“城市”一词显然是由“a-tl ”（水）和“tepe-tl ”（山）组合而成，在西班牙语中没有对应的词。在西班牙语中， “ ciudad ”一词更多地带有城市地位的含义，而非地理上的显著性。总的来说，纳瓦特尔语单词大多是由许多短小的部分组成的长序列，其含义通常与西班牙语中的一个完整句子一样丰富：ōtikmihiyōwiltih由ō-ti-km-ihiyōwi-ltih (过去式-你-它-你自己-遭受-导致)组成，意思是“你已经同意遭受它”，其中反身和使役部分（位于第四个也是最后一个位置）实际上是为了表示特殊的尊重，并提高话语的正式程度。

But the rules of combination, to create longer words and sentences, are also radically different between the two languages. So the respect implicit in the Spanish use of Su for ‘your’ at the beginning is expressed in Nahuatl by adding tzin at the end of each of the words. In this same phrase, the Nahuatl word for ‘city’ is quite clearly a combination of a-tl, ‘water’, and tepe-tl, ‘mountain’, corresponding to nothing in Spanish, where the word ciudad has more connotations of civic status than geographical eminence. In general, Nahuatl words are mostly long sequences of short parts, often containing as much meaning as a whole sentence in Spanish: ōtikmihiyōwiltih is made up of ō-ti-k-m-ihiyōwi-ltih (past-you-it-yourself-suffer-cause), ‘you have consented to suffer it’, where the reflexive and causative bits (in fourth and final place) actually serve to show special respect, and to raise the formality of the utterance.

但语音、词汇和语法仅仅是语言差异的冰山一角。正如每个人都有自己独特的说话方式（即使声音并非独一无二），每种语言也都有其独特的表达风格。当语言彼此接近，且经常相互翻译时，这种差异可能会被最小化，例如西欧语言之间就经常出现这种情况。但这种差异始终存在，并且在纳瓦特尔语与西班牙语的交汇处尤为明显。

But phonology, vocabulary and grammar are just the beginning of what makes languages differ. Just as each person has a distinctive manner of speaking, quite apart from a recognisable voice, there is a characteristic style of expression which goes with each language. This difference may be minimised when languages are in close proximity, and very often translated one into another, as tends to be the case, say, among the languages of western Europe. But it is always there implicitly, and stands out very clearly in the encounter of Nahuatl with Spanish.

纳瓦特尔语风格最显著的特点是近义词的不断重复：ōtikmihiyōwiltih ōtikmoziyawiltih，“你受苦了，你很累”；in mopetlatzin, in mokpaltzin，“你的垫子，你的宝座”；ahmō zan nikočitlēwa, ahmō zan nikkočitta, ahmō zan niktēmiki, ka yē ōnimitznottili, mīštzinko ōnitlačiš，“我不是在做梦，也不是在幻想；因为我见过你，我注视过你。”相比之下，欧洲特有的报道风格，即用第三人称简洁地复述整段讲话，就像西班牙人对科尔特斯讲话的描述一样，与纳瓦特尔语截然不同：不是“他说：‘我不知道怎么付钱给你……’”，而是“他告诉他，他不知道怎么付钱给他……”等等。

The most evident aspect of Nahuatl style is the constant doubling of near-synonyms: ōtikmihiyōwiltih ōtikmoziyawiltih, ‘you have suffered, you are tired’; in mopetlatzin, in mokpaltzin, ‘your mat, your throne’; ahmō zan nikočitlēwa, ahmō zan nikkočitta, ahmō zan niktēmiki, ka yē ōnimitznottili, mīštzinko ōnitlačiš, ‘I am not dreaming, not fantasising; for I have seen you, I have looked upon you.’ By contrast, the characteristic European style of reporting, where a whole speech is retailed curtly in the third person, as in the Spanish account of Cortés’s words, is something quite alien to Nahuatl: not ‘He said: “I do not know how to pay you …"’ but ‘He told him that he did not know how to pay him …’, etc.

这些都是语言在日常使用中体现出的显著差异的例子。但除此之外，语言还承载着其历史记录，这些记录存在于使用者的记忆中以及书面形式中。

These are examples of the characteristic differences between languages in daily use. But then there is the area of language’s past record, in the minds of its speakers as well as in writing.

莫特库佐马和科尔特斯都深受他们过往言辞的影响。科尔特斯很快就即兴发表了一番布道，这自然毫无意义，因为他的听众并不了解他在天主教西班牙成长过程中接触到的基督教经典。但这位特拉托阿尼的演讲也同样精雕细琢，散发着“古人言辞”（ wewe-tlatolli ）的韵味，这种言辞是墨西哥精英青年学校卡尔梅卡克（ kalmēkak）课程的一部分。例如，其中就包括一篇关于职责的演讲，要向新任命的特拉托阿尼发表：“我们最宁静仁慈的君主，我们最慷慨英勇的国王，比所有宝石都珍贵，甚至比蓝宝石还要珍贵！我们所看到的难道是一场梦吗？我们难道是醉酒了，因为我们看到了我们的君主赐予我们您这样一位君王和主宰的恩赐？”我们的主上帝确实为我们设立了新的太阳，它无比辉煌，如同黎明的曙光…… ³

Both Motecuhzoma and Cortés were in thrall to their verbal pasts. Cortés was soon engaged in giving an impromptu sermon, which would naturally have made little sense, since his audience lacked a knowledge of the Christian texts with which he had grown up in Catholic Spain. But the tlatoani’s speech, too, is a polished production, redolent of the wewe-tlatolli, ‘the speech of the ancients’, which was part of the curriculum at the kalmēkak, the school for Mexican elite youth. This included, for example, a speech on duty, to be delivered to a recently appointed tlatoani: ‘Our lord of greatest serenity and humanity, and our king of great generosity and valour, more precious than all precious stones, even than sapphire! Could it be a dream that we are seeing? Could we be drunk in seeing what our lord has done for us in giving us you for king and lord? And truly our lord God has set over us a new sun of great splendour and a light like the dawn’s …’³

这本经典的学校课本也讲述了同样的主题：一位新领袖如梦中降临，如同天降之光。然而，莫特库佐马向科尔特斯致辞时，却缺少了在欢迎新任特拉托阿尼（tlatoani，阿兹特克语，意为“领袖”）的仪式中，总会在致辞前穿插的训诫。在训诫中，新领袖会被充分提醒其职责，切勿因地位的提升而骄傲自满。对于阿兹特克听众而言，这些友好的告诫在对科尔特斯的问候中被省略，是否会让他们感到奇怪呢？

The same themes are here in this classic school text, of a new leader appearing as in a dream, and being like a light from the sky. But what was missing in Motecuhzoma’s greetings to Cortés was anything like the speech that always preceded this one in the ceremonies of welcome to a new tlatoani, a speech in which he would be fully reminded of his duties, and the need not to let his new eminence go to his head. Would it have seemed strange to the Aztec audience that these friendly cautions were omitted in the greetings to Cortés?

纳瓦特尔语的一个特点是使用亲昵的称呼来表达敬意：我们看到的用作敬语的“ -tzin”在现代纳瓦特尔语中仍然用作亲昵的后缀（例如no-kokonē-tzin，“我亲爱的孩子”），有人认为这实际上就是它的原意。当然，从我们的角度来看，纳瓦特尔语的礼貌用法包含一些奇特的颠倒：在婚礼宴会上，人们可能会称呼总督为“我亲爱的孩子”，而在王室宫廷中，他们的侍从则会被君主称为“我们的祖先”。在纳瓦特尔语的礼仪中，似乎真正的尊重是通过一种相当大胆的亲昵来表达的，或许反过来也是如此。甚至有人认为^，莫特库佐马对科尔特斯讲话时极度恭敬的语气和缺乏亲昵的措辞，实际上表明他是在贬低这位西班牙人，或者至少试图在两人之间拉开距离。如果真是如此，这无疑是一种极其不明智的做法。科尔特斯本人受过高等教育，但他恐怕难以领会这种陌生的宫廷修辞中蕴含的微妙之处。

A feature of Nahuatl style has always been the use of endearments as terms of honour: the -tzin we have seen used as an honorific is still used in modern Nahuatl as an affectionate suffix (no-kokonē-tzin, ‘my dear child’), and it has been argued that this was in fact its original sense. Certainly, the polite use of Nahuatl involves some strange reversals from our point of view: a governor at a wedding feast may be spoken to as ‘my dear child’, while the retainers at a royal court would be addressed by their lord as ‘our progenitors’. In Nahuatl etiquette, it seems that genuine respect was shown by adopting a rather daring familiarity, and perhaps the converse was also true. It has even been suggested⁴ that the highly reverential tone and the absence of affectionate terms in Motecuhzoma’s speech to Cortés actually show that he was demeaning the Spaniard, or at least trying to assert a distance between the two of them. If true, this was a singularly ill-judged approach. Cortés was himself a highly educated man—but he could hardly pick up on the courtly subtleties of such an alien rhetoric.

以上简要分析已表明，十六世纪墨西哥西班牙语与纳瓦特尔语的碰撞，使两种高度发达的文化彼此对立。随后几代人转向使用西班牙语，不仅改变了语言，也改变了观念。以至于在墨西哥，使用纳瓦特尔语（也称墨西哥语）而非西班牙语的社会意义一直延续至今。人们常说这样的话：

This brief analysis has already shown that the encounter between Spanish and Nahuatl in sixteenth-century Mexico pitted two developed cultures one against another. The switch to speaking Spanish that came about in the next few generations involved a change of heart as well as tongue. So much so that the social significance in Mexico of speaking Nahuatl (also called Mexicano) rather than Spanish has lasted up to the present day. Speakers make comments like these:

纳瓦特尔语不可能消失，因为它是祖先留给我们的遗产。

There is no way that Nahuatl could disappear because it is the inheritance from our forefathers.

我们这些说墨西哥语的人，这语言是属于我们祖辈的。墨西哥语永远不要消失。我的祖父母一直都说纳瓦特尔语，他们从不用西班牙语。

Those of us who speak Mexicano, well, it’s something that belongs to our grandparents. Let Mexicano never be lost. My grandfather and my grandmother always spoke in Nahuatl. They never used the Spanish language.

^{能够说纳瓦特尔语既重要又令人欣喜，因为这是墨西哥最地道的语言。我认为这非常重要，因为我们觉得自己才是真正的墨西哥人，西班牙语是征服时期才传入墨西哥的。从那时起，人们开始在我们的国家说西班牙语。但在征服之前，我们的祖父母说的是纳瓦特尔语。显然}，征服带来了许多变化。文明程度提高了，所以我认为对我们来说，说西班牙语也很重要。但我们无法停止说纳瓦特尔语，因为我们的父母说这种语言，我们也跟着他们说。

It is important and at the same time nice to be able to speak Nahuatl because this is the authentic way of talking in Mexico. I consider it very important because we feel we are the authentic Mexicans, because Spanish was only brought here with the Conquest. From that time on people started to speak Spanish in our country. But before the Conquest our grandparents spoke Nahuatl. Obviously the Conquest brought a lot of changes. There was more civilization, and that’s why I think it is important for us also to speak Spanish. But we haven’t been able to stop speaking Nahuatl because our parents speak it and we follow them.⁵

每一种语言都定义了一个社群，即使用该语言并能彼此理解的人们。语言不仅是他们之间的沟通工具，更是他们独特身份的旗帜，这常常令试图为所有不同语言社群塑造单一身份的政府感到沮丧。这可能会产生相当反常的后果。纳瓦特尔语以及墨西哥的许多其他古老语言在十八世纪末期基本从书面使用中消失，这并非巧合。当时，由城市西班牙语使用者领导的政治运动正在提升墨西哥作为一个独立国家的意识，并寻求独立。说西班牙语的混血儿与说墨西哥古老语言的“印第安人”之间的对比被视为对真正墨西哥人身份认同的干扰。那些被视为“落后”的古老语言必须被淘汰。

Every language defines a community, the people who speak it and can understand one another. A language acts not just as a means of communication among them but a banner of their distinct identity, often to the despair of national governments trying to forge a single identity for all their different language communities. This can have quite perverse effects. It is no coincidence that Nahuatl, with many other ancestral languages of Mexico, largely disappeared from written use towards the end of the eighteenth century, just when political movements led by urban Spanish speakers were raising consciousness of Mexico as a separate country with a view to independence. The contrast between Spanish-speaking mestizos and ‘Indians’ speaking the ancient languages of Mexico was seen as a distraction from the emergence of the identity of the true Mexican. The older languages, seen as ‘backward’, had to go.

本书试图传达每种语言所讲述的故事中蕴含的独特世界观。显然，使用某种特定语言并不意味着就拥有了一套完整的人生哲学：但有些比喻会比其他比喻更容易浮现在脑海中；有些心境或态度，在一种语言中比在另一种语言中更容易被接受。我们所说的语言，或者我们的祖先所说的语言，都绝非无关紧要。语言塑造、分析并影响着我们对世界的看法。“我有三颗心，”早期拉丁语诗歌大师恩尼乌斯（Ennius）曾这样宣称，因为他精通拉丁语、希腊语和奥斯坎语。 ⁶

This book attempts to convey something of the characteristic viewpoint on the world of each language whose story it tells. Evidently, living in a particular language does not define a total philosophy of life: but some metaphors will come to mind more readily than others; and some states of mind, or attitudes to others, are easier to assume in one language than another. It cannot be a matter of indifference which language we speak, or which languages our ancestors spoke. Languages frame, analyse and colour our views of the world. ‘I have three hearts,’ claimed Ennius, an early master poet in Latin, on the strength of his fluency in Latin, Greek and Oscan.⁶

^问题不在于这些共同特征总是虚构的（例如纳粹对犹太人的定义标准），甚至也不在于它们对生存客观上无关紧要（例如，携带镰状细胞贫血症和地中海贫血症的基因显然会增加遗传疾病的风险，同时增强对疟疾的抵抗力）。问题源于统计学的逻辑：在选择研究对象时，总是需要从更大的特征集合中挑选出一部分特征。但是，共享某一特征集合的人群可能并不共享另一特征集合——而且谁又能预先判断哪些特征定义了具有有趣历史的群体呢？在实践中，所选择的特征往往印证了研究者的先入之见，使得（例如）世界人口群体的遗传分类与传统语言分类之间的对应关系显得不那么令人惊讶。这种在构建统计模型时必然存在的任意性，是卢卡·卡瓦利-斯福尔扎（例如，2001）及其众多追随者所提出的“人口梯度史前史”可信度的根本缺陷。

^* The problem is not that the shared properties are always imaginary (as the Nazis’ criteria for Jewishness may have been), or even objectively unimportant for survival (e.g. as the possession of genes for sickle-cell anaemia and thalassaemia clearly predispose to inherited disease, while giving resistance to malaria). It stems from the logic of statistics: when picking out a population for study, a subset of properties always has to be chosen from a much larger set. But populations who share one subset may not share another—and who is to say (in advance of the study) which properties define the group with the interesting history? In practice, the properties chosen tend to bear out the preconceptions of the researchers, making (e.g.) the correspondence between genetic and traditional linguistic classification of the world’s population groups less than astounding. This necessary arbitrariness in setting up the statistical models is a fundamental flaw in the credibility of the population-gradient prehistory associated with Luca Cavalli-Sforza (e.g. 2001) and his many followers.

^具有讽刺意味的是，一个常见的问题是，作家的保守主义导致他们使用的符号指向的是一种已经不再使用的语言版本。在抄写学校学到的知识的记忆，可能会凌驾于抄写员实际听到的内容之上。

^* A common problem, ironically, is that writers’ conservatism has made their symbols refer to a version of the language already out of use. Memories of what was learnt in the scribal school can take precedence over what the scribe was actually hearing.

^†埃及语已弃用象形文字，（现称科普特语）采用源自希腊字母的文字书写。阿卡德语和苏美尔语已完全不再书写；因此楔形文字已成为死文字。腓尼基语也已消失，尽管从爱尔兰到暹罗，所有现存的字母都源自其原始文字。玛雅象形文字在西班牙征服时期被弃用，如今所有这些语言都使用罗马字母书写。与此同时，汉语仍然使用最初由下令焚毁全国所有书籍的人标准化的文字书写。参见第四章“第一次统一”，第137页。

^†Egyptian has dropped hieroglyphs, and (now known as Coptic) is written in an alphabet derived from Greek. Akkadian and Sumerian are no longer written at all; so cuneiform is a dead letter. Phoenician too is gone, although every alphabet in use from Ireland to Siam is derived from its original script. Mayan glyphs were discontinued at the time of the Spanish conquest, and now all these languages are written in Roman. Meanwhile Chinese continues to be written in the script first standardised by the man who ordered the burning of every book in the country. See Chapter 4, ‘First Unity’, p. 137.

2

成为世界语言需要什么条件；或者，你永远无法预料

2

What It Takes to Be a World Language; or, You Never Can Tell

在过去的五百年里，兼并和收购的历史力量使许多欧洲语言跻身世界前二十大语言之列，但到了二十世纪末，这种力量似乎已经耗尽——或者至少是被阻碍了。

The historic forces of merger and acquisition which, over the last five hundred years, built up many of the European languages in the world’s Top Twenty seemed to have spent themselves—or at least to be dammed up—by the end of the twentieth century.

公开的帝国主义行径不再被辩护。其最终目的不再被公开宣称，尽管21世纪初为征服阿富汗和伊拉克而发动的两场“外科手术式”战争表明，这种手段仍然被接受。同样，大规模移民潮也暂时停止。过去两个世纪，来自欧洲国家的移民潮塑造了如今英语和葡萄牙语世界的大部分地区，主要集中在美洲，但也包括非洲、澳大利亚和新西兰。随后，在20世纪下半叶，来自曾经的殖民地国家的移民潮规模虽小但数量可观，在欧洲腹地形成了新的语言社群。

Overt imperialism is no longer defended. The end is no longer openly willed, though the two surgical wars that led off the twenty-first century, to conquer Afghanistan and Iraq, show that the means are still accepted. Likewise, the flow of large-scale migration is for the time being halted. In the past two centuries, flows from European countries had created much of what are now the English-speaking and the Portuguese-speaking worlds, mostly in the Americas, but also in Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Then, in the second half of the twentieth century, there was a significant, but much smaller, flow from once colonised countries, which has created new language communities insulated in the heart of European lands.

塑造未来的趋势仍然不明朗。目前，仍有大量移民志愿者，他们的足迹遍布世界各地，而不仅仅局限于前殖民地国家；阻碍他们流动和定居的主要因素是他们心仪的接收国不愿接纳他们。尽管一些评论家预言即将爆发“文明冲突”，认为阿拉伯语世界和英语世界之间的冲突将最为直接，但由强国维系的政治格局似乎依然稳固。

The trends that will form the future are still obscure. At present, there is still a multitude of migration volunteers, found in a much wider range of countries, not just ex-colonies; the main brake on their movement and resettlement is the unwillingness of their desired host countries to take them in. While some pundits write of an impending ‘clash of civilisations’, pitting most immediately the Arabic- and English-speaking worlds against each other, the political fabric guaranteed by powerful nations seems firm.

但世界语言的未来并非时事热点，甚至也非新闻分析所能涵盖。语言的传播是一个长期的过程，至少以世代为单位，通常以世纪甚至千年为单位。本书的核心问题是：在过去，语言社群是如何在何种环境下、以何种动力发展壮大的？同时，它们又是如何衰落乃至消亡的？

But the world’s language future is not a matter of current affairs, or even news analysis. Language spread is a long-term thing, measured at the very least in generations and more often in centuries and millennia. The fundamental question of this book is to ask how—in what circumstances and with what dynamics—language communities have come to flourish in the past, as well as how some of them have declined and even met their ends.

语言发展最直接的方式可以称之为“农夫式发展”。社群只需保持团结，发展壮大即可。这就是所谓的“有机增长”，是东亚和南亚大型语言的典型发展模式，在欧洲，尤其是在东部地区，也并非鲜见。^*这并非一种积极主动的策略，但它引出了一个必然的问题：遵循这种策略的语言是如何抵御外来社群的入侵，避免其稳步发展受到干扰的呢？

The most straightforward way in which a language can come to flourish could be called the Farmer’s Approach. All the community needs to do is stay united, and grow its population. This is Organic Growth, which is the typical story of large languages in eastern and southern Asia, and not unknown even in Europe, especially towards the east.^* It is not a strategy of active initiative, but it does raise a consequent question: how have languages that follow such a policy been able to defend themselves from foreign communities, which might be tempted to invade and disrupt their steady growth?

这种颠覆性变革本质上源于语言社群采取的更为激进的道路：我们可以将它们比作现代商业世界中的进攻型企业，称之为“并购语言”（M&A）。如果说有机增长是农民的策略，那么这种替代方案或许更应该被称为“猎人之道”。

The disruption would come, by its nature, from language communities following a less placid path: they may be called the Merger and Acquisition languages (M&A), by analogy with the offensive players in the modern business world. If Organic Growth is the strategy of farmers, this alternative could rather be called the Hunter’s Way.

这种由社群间直接接触引起的语言变化，有时被归类为三种类型：迁徙，即语言社群整体迁移，并将新的语言带入新的社群；扩散，即语言使用者并非大规模迁移，而是一个社群的使用者逐渐将自己的语言同化为他们接触的另一个社群的语言；以及渗透，它是前两种类型的混合。 ¹英语传入北美和澳大利亚属于迁徙；传入印度和斯堪的纳维亚属于扩散；传入南非属于渗透。 ^†例如，只有通过扩散或渗透，一种语言才能成为通用语，即更广泛的交流语言：为此，这种语言必须被那些并非以它为母语的人所接受。

Such change, resulting from direct contact between communities, is sometimes characterised as one of three types: Migration, where a language community moves bodily, bringing a new language with it; Diffusion, where speakers do not actually move in large numbers but where speakers of one community come to assimilate their language to that of another with whom they are in contact; and Infiltration, which is a mixture of the former two.¹ The progress of English into North America and Australia is a case of Migration; into India and Scandinavia, of Diffusion; and into South Africa, of Infiltration.^† It is only, for example, through Diffusion or Infiltration that a language can become a lingua franca, a language of wider communication: for this, a language must have been taken up by people who did not speak it natively.

这些并购语言社群的作用发展迅速，往往是通过精心策划的行动实现的。实际上，我们将主要追踪这些语言的发展历程，因为它们无疑是最引人注目、最激动人心的。

These M&A language communities are the ones whose role develops fast, often through deliberate actions. In practice, these will be the main languages whose careers we trace, because of course they are the most eventful.

是否存在某种共同特征，使得一个语言社群能够吸引他人使用其语言，并最终加入其中？本书的主题可以理解为对语言威望根源的探究，语言威望被定义为吸引新用户的倾向。语言在何种条件下具备这种增长能力？新旧语言之间是否存在某种关系，使得使用者愿意且能够跨越语言的界限？

Is there any common feature that makes a language community entice others to use its language, and so join it? A way of viewing this book’s theme is as an inquiry into the roots of Language Prestige, defined as the propensity to attract new users. Under what conditions do languages have the power to grow in this way? And are there any properties of the relation between the new and the old language which make speakers willing and able to make the leap?

有一种有害的观念，甚至在语言学家中也普遍存在，那就是认为这个问题有一个简单直接、冷酷无情的答案。20世纪中期英国著名语言学家J.R. Firth对此做出了一个简洁明了的阐述：

There is a pernicious belief, widespread even among linguists, that there is a straightforward, heartless, answer to this question. J. R. Firth, a leading British linguist of the mid-twentieth century, makes a good simple statement of it:

世界强权创造世界语言……罗马帝国创造了拉丁语，大英帝国创造了英语。当然，教会也是强大的力量……那些对世界及其事务充满强烈情感的人做出了最大的贡献。很难想象，如果没有希伯来语、阿拉伯语、拉丁语、梵语和英语，那些谦逊的语言统一倡导者们会取得怎样的成就。政治家、士兵、水手和传教士，那些行动派、那些情感丰富的人，创造了世界语言。这些语言的建立，离不开鲜血、金钱、汗水和为追求权力而付出的苦难^。

World powers make world languages … The Roman Empire made Latin, the British Empire English. Churches too, of course, are great powers … Men who have strong feelings directed towards the world and its affairs have done most. What the humble prophets of linguistic unity would have done without Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit and English, it is difficult to imagine. Statesmen, soldiers, sailors, and missionaries, men of action, men of strong feelings have made world languages. They are built on blood, money, sinews, and suffering in the pursuit of power.²

首先，这是 1937 年一声响亮的呐喊，当时正值大英帝国走向衰落、基督教盛行、男性至上主义盛行之际；（为他辩护的是）弗斯似乎主要关注的是，在构建国际语言方面，行动派的精力充沛与学者的萎靡不振形成对比。

This is above all a resonant cri de c$oeur from 1937, the dying days of the British empire, muscular Christianity and male supremacism; and (in his defence) Firth seems mainly to have been concerned to contrast the effectiveness of lusty men of action with enervated scholars in building international languages.

然而，这种观点根本经不起推敲。一旦认真研究语言的发展历程——即使是弗斯明确提及的“希伯来语、阿拉伯语、拉丁语、梵语和英语”这些例子——就会发现，这种自以为是、固执己见的观点根本无法解释语言传播的真正原因。它既不能解释世界所有语言的起源，也不能解释世界强国取得的成就。

Nevertheless it really does not stand up to criticism. As soon as the careers of languages are seriously studied—even the ‘Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit and English’ that Firth explicitly mentions as examples—it becomes clear that this self-indulgently tough-minded view is no guide at all to what really makes a language capable of spreading. It works neither as an account of where all world languages come from, nor what all world powers achieve.

弗斯引用的例子或许最能佐证这一点，例如持续数个世纪的多民族军事帝国，如罗马帝国和不列颠帝国。尽管罗曼语族语言至今仍在使用，其共同的名称也表明了它们的共同起源，但它们却是在罗马统治被日耳曼征服者稳定取代的国家中发展起来的。法兰克人、勃艮第人、汪达尔人和哥特人在罗马帝国衰落后建立了西欧王国，他们至多只是影响了拉丁语的口音，并为其词汇增添了一些词汇；他们从未成功地将自己的语言强加给新的臣民。然而，在地中海的另一端，罗马人自身在传播拉丁语方面也同样举步维艰：公元395年，尽管罗马已直接统治了五百多年，希腊人、叙利亚人和埃及人仍然在使用希腊语交流。（此后，罗马帝国分裂为东西两部分，拉丁语很快在东部地区失去了正式的地位。）

The best case for it might be thought to come from the examples Firth cites, multinational military empires that lasted for centuries, such as the Roman and British efforts. But although Romance languages are still with us, their common name showing their common origin, they grew up in countries where Roman rule had been stably replaced by Germanic conquerors. The Franks, Burgundians, Vandals and Goths who set up the kingdoms of western Europe after the fall of the empire at most had an effect on the accent with which Latin was spoken and added a few words to its vocabulary; they nowhere succeeded in imposing their language on their new subjects. Yet at the other end of the Mediterranean, the Romans themselves had had no better success in spreading Latin: in 395, despite over five hundred years of direct Roman rule, Greeks, Syrians and Egyptians were still talking to each other in Greek. (Thereafter the empire was divided east from west, and Latin soon lost even a formal role in the east.)

更远的地方，在中国北方，突厥语、蒙古语和通古斯语的入侵者屡次征服，从公元4世纪起统治了近千年，其中约有700年，但这并未对汉人的生存造成任何影响；最终，通古斯语的满族于1644年征服了整个中国，然而不到一个世纪，他们的语言就消亡了。回到中东，阿拉伯语征服者的胜利也只是暂时的：从7世纪中叶开始，他们的文明垄断了伊朗及其东西邻国，但当塞尔柱突厥人在11世纪从另一侧征服伊朗时，人们才意识到阿拉伯语从未真正扎根，除了宗教之外，其他所有语言都重新回归波斯语。

Farther afield, in the north of China, repeated conquests by Turkish-, Mongol- and Tungus-speaking invaders, who ruled for some seven hundred years out of a thousand from the fourth century AD, had no effect on the survival of Chinese; finally, the Tungus-speaking Manchu conquered the whole country in 1644, and yet within a century their own language had died out. Back in the Middle East, the triumphs of the Arabic-speaking conquerors were only temporary: from the mid-seventh century, their civilisation monopolised Iran, along with its neighbours to west and east, but when the Seljuk Turks conquered the country from the other side in the eleventh century, it became clear that Arabic had never taken root, and the language of everything but religion reverted to Persian.

显然，彻底的征服，无论是军事上的还是精神上的，并非总能促成语言的改变。然而，有时看似弱势的群体却能做到这一点。例如，游牧民族的语言阿拉米语，在公元前八世纪席卷了正值鼎盛时期的亚述帝国，取代了可以追溯到美索不达米亚文明之初的阿卡德语。又如，梵语在公元第一个千年间被东南亚各地广泛接受，成为精英阶层的通用语言，尽管它并非依靠任何士兵从印度跨越重洋而来。甚至连十五世纪秘鲁印加帝国的官方语言克丘亚语，似乎也是王朝妥协的结果：统治者放弃了自己的语言，以确保民众能够有序地接受其权力的扩张。

Evidently, total conquest, military and even spiritual, is not always enough to effect a language change. Yet at times an apparently weaker community can achieve just this. Consider Aramaic, the language of nomads, which swept through an Assyrian empire still at the height of its power in the eighth century BC, replacing the noble Akkadian, which went back to the very beginning of Mesopotamian civilisation. Or consider Sanskrit, taken up all over South-East Asia in the first millennium AD as the language of elite discourse, even though it came across the sea from India backed by not a single soldier. It even appears that Quechua, which became the language of the Inca empire in Peru in the fifteenth century, had actually been adopted as a dynastic compromise: the rulers gave up their own language in order to secure orderly acceptance of a vast extension of their power.

经济实力，无论是在英国还是美国的推动下，通常被认为是英语传播的根本原因，但这种实力似乎比军事力量更缺乏强制力。公元前第一个千年的大部分时间里，腓尼基航运主导着地中海的贸易；在那个时期的大部分时间里，腓尼基殖民地迦太基在西部也拥有强大的影响力，为其提供支持，而迦太基也使用同一种语言。但腓尼基语似乎在其定居点之外鲜为人知：希腊语是国际通用语，甚至在迦太基军队中也得到使用。更往东，到了公元6至8世纪，通往中国的丝绸之路上的女王是伊朗城市撒马尔罕：它的语言是粟特语，但又有谁听说过它呢？粟特商人虽然富有，但他们发现使用顾客的语言——阿拉伯语、汉语、维吾尔-突厥语和藏语——是一种明智的做法^。

Economic power, often believed to lie at the root of the spread of English, whether under British or American sponsorship, seems even less coercive than the military. Phoenician shipping dominated the trade of the Mediterranean for most of the first millennium BC; for much of that time, it was backed up in the west by the dominance of the Phoenician colony of Carthage, which spoke the same language. But the Phoenician language seems to have remained unknown outside its own settlements: Greek was the lingua franca for international discourse, used even in the Carthaginian army. Farther east and later on, in the sixth to eighth centuries AD, the queen of the Silk Roads to China was the Iranian city of Samarkand: its language was Sogdian, but who has heard of it? Sogdian merchants, rich as they were, found it politic to use the customers’ languages—Arabic, Chinese, Uighur-Turkic and Tibetan.³

在那段铿锵有力的引言中，弗斯强调了权力的宗教维度，而这一点往往至关重要：或许，我们真正应该谈论的不是语言的威望，而是语言的魅力。梵语除了是印度教的圣语之外，也深受佛陀弟子的影响；如果没有犹太教，希伯来语可能在几千年前就已经失传了。阿拉伯语的情况则更为复杂：从长远来看，伊斯兰教被证明是其传播的根本动力，但正是阿拉伯军队将这种语言带到了西亚和北非，建立了新的国家，随后在这些国家中开展了传教活动。阿拉伯人也以在印度洋周边地区经商而闻名，但伊斯兰教在这一地区的传播从未赋予阿拉伯语除宗教仪式之外的任何意义。有趣的是，宗教传播的语言影响几乎与传教士自身的优先事项无关：基督徒对表达其信仰的语言相当漠不关心，他们的经典文本《新约》记录的耶稣的言论也是翻译过来的；然而，基督教本身在保护和维护许多语言（包括阿拉姆语、希腊语、拉丁语和哥特语）的声誉方面发挥了至关重要的作用。

In that muscular quote, Firth had emphasised the religious dimension of power, and this is often important: perhaps, indeed, we should be talking not of language prestige but language charisma. Sanskrit, besides being the sacred language of Hinduism, has owed much to disciples of the Buddha; and Hebrew would have been lost thousands of years ago without Judaism. Arabic is more ambiguous: in the long term, Islam has proved the fundamental motive for its spread, but it was Arab-led armies which actually took the language into western Asia and northern Africa, creating new states in which proselytising would follow. Arabs were also famous as traders round the Indian Ocean, but the acceptance of Islam in this area has never given Arabic anything more than a role in liturgy. Curiously, the linguistic effects of spreading conversions turn out to be almost independent of the preachers’ own priorities: Christians have been fairly indifferent to the language in which their faith is expressed, and their classic text, the New Testament, records the sayings of Jesus in translation; and yet Christianity itself has played a crucial role in the preservation of, and indeed the prestige of, many languages, including Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Gothic.

事实上，宗教传播对世界语言的发展进程仅起到了一定的作用。有人可能会说，宗教只是语言文化维度的一个例证，而文化维度才是语言声望的最终来源。当然，“文化”一词含义极其宽泛，涵盖了从手斧的制作到企业使命宣言，再到对莎士比亚十四行诗和葛饰北斋绘画的精妙鉴赏等方方面面；因此，其相关性需要我们更加深入地研究。^*

In fact, proselytising religion has been a factor in the careers of only a minority of world languages. It could be claimed that religion is just an example of the cultural dimension of language, which represents the ultimate source of language prestige. Culture, of course, is an extremely vague word, covering everything from the shaping of hand-axes to corporate mission statements, as well as the finer appreciation of the sonnets of Shakespeare and the paintings of Hokusai; so its relevance will need considerably closer attention.^*

在分析史前民族迁徙，以及一个民族以近乎残酷的方式取代另一个民族（例如班图语族群扩散至非洲南部三分之一的地区，导致桑人和科伊人的领地范围缩小；又如南岛语族航海者深入东南亚并与美拉尼西亚人接触）时，人们几乎毫不犹豫地探讨那些被认为赋予了民族优势的文化因素。精湛的技艺和高等学识通常不被认为是主要因素。那些能够增强人口承载能力的文化因素（例如，通过新的耕作或畜牧方式）被认为尤为重要。但军事实践中的简单创新也可能奏效。

In the analysis of prehistoric movements of peoples, and the apparent ruthlessness with which one comes to replace another (as in the Bantu-speaking peoples’ spread across the southern third of Africa, with consequent restriction of the domains of the San and Khoi; or the penetration of Austronesian sailors into South-East Asia and into contact with Melanesians), there is little reluctance to discuss the cultural factors presumed to have given the advantage. Finer arts and higher learning are not usually considered serious contenders. Cultural factors that enhance the ability to support larger populations (for example, by new forms of farming or husbandry) are deemed especially important. But simple innovations in military practice may also be effective.

有时，残酷的生物学规律会占据主导，文化差异则被暂时搁置，变得无关紧要。如果一个族群更容易死于疾病，就像十六世纪新大陆被欧洲入侵者征服的居民那样，那么他们的武器装备和军事战术远逊于欧洲人，或者他们种植的蔬菜（包括土豆、玉米、西红柿和巧克力）最终成为世界顶级作物，这些都无关紧要。

Occasionally, brute biology takes over, and mere cultural differences are left on the sidelines, for a time irrelevant. If a population was vastly more liable to die from disease, as were the invaded inhabitants of the New World facing European interlopers in the sixteenth century, it hardly mattered that their weaponry and military tactics were also vastly inferior—or by contrast that the vegetables they cultivated (including potatoes and maize, tomatoes and chocolate) turned out to be world-beaters.

但探寻语言流行的原因通常并非如此简单。在人类历史上不同民族之间的接触和语言之间的竞争中——即便我们有目击者的证词来确保我们对事实真相的客观判断——我们往往也找不到那些明显起决定性作用的文化差异。这时，我们就需要进行更深入的探究：不仅要考察不同社群之间的关联、彼此的认知、语言社群的主观声誉以及客观优势，甚至——这在语言学家中尤其显得非常规——还要探究语言本身的特性。

But the search for the causes of language prevalence is not usually so easily resolved. In the historic record of contacts between peoples, and contests between languages—when we have eyewitness testimony to keep us honest about what really went on—we often cannot point to cultural differences that were clearly crucial. Then we may have to look deeper: not just into the perceived associations of the different communities, how they looked to each other, the language communities’ subjective reputations as well as their objective advantages, but even—and this is deeply unconventional, especially among linguists—to the properties of the languages themselves.

令人匪夷所思的是，语言学家几乎一致认为，他们研究的语言的基本属性——例如语言使用的语音类型、基本词序、以及语言是通过串联短小独立的词语还是通过前缀或后缀系统来构建结构——与语言的生存前景无关。毕竟，他们认为，每种语言从定义上来说都是儿童可以学习的：这才是它成为人类语言的根本原因。如果一个社群在传播其语言方面遇到问题，那一定是社会原因造成的，而不是语言本身的问题。

Bizarrely, linguists almost universally assume that the basic properties of languages which they study—the kinds of sounds a language uses, its basic word order, whether it works by stringing together short and independent words or by coordinating systems of prefixes or suffixes—are irrelevant to languages’ prospects of survival. After all, they reckon, every language is by definition learnable by children: that’s what makes it a human language. If a community has problems propagating its language, there must be a social cause, not a linguistic one.

但对我们而言，如果将语言视为使用该语言的社群的独特标志，我们只能思考所有这些语言结构存在的意义何在。或许语言类型本身就具有生存价值，它决定着一个长期使用另一种语言的新群体能否轻易接受这种语言。本书的创新之处在于：探讨了社群所使用的语言类型可能产生的影响。（参见第十四章“是什么使一种语言易于学习”，第552页。）

But for us, viewing the language as distinctive of the community that speaks it, we can only wonder what all that linguistic structure is there for. Perhaps a language’s type even has survival value, determining whether a new population that has long spoken another language can readily take it up or not. This is one of the innovations of this book: to suggest ways in which it might actually matter what type of a language a community speaks. (See Chapter 14, ‘What makes a language learnable’, p. 552.)

本书的整体宣传计划是大致按时间顺序回顾那些在世界历史上占据重要地位的语言。它从文字出现之初开始，因为那时我们才首次拥有关于人们当时所使用的语言的明确证据。我们始终坚持要求提供明确的证据，即书面记录，因此我们不得不略过许多被认为发生在文字出现之前的事件。^*故事一直延续到我们探讨近年来发展迅速的主要语言，我们称之为“并购”语言。

The plan of campaign for the book as a whole is to review, more or less in temporal order, the histories of languages that have loomed large in the world. It starts from the onset of literacy, because that is when we first have clear evidence of what languages people were speaking. Our policy at every point has been to require explicit evidence, in effect written traces, and so to pass over many events that are believed to have happened in a pre-literate past.^* And the story continues until we confront the major languages of recent growth, what we have called ‘M&A’ languages.

事实证明，这段历史可以分为两个主要时期，分界线为1492年。这标志着欧洲及其部分语言开始向全球扩张。在此之前，语言几乎总是沿着陆路传播，其结果也具有地域性：一些大型语言在相对集中的区域内使用。此后，海洋成为语言传播的主要通道，语言的传播范围也扩展到全球：一种语言可以在许多不同大陆的不同区域使用，其流通仅通过横跨大洋的贸易和军事网络维系。

As it turns out, the story falls into two major epochs, which divide at 1492. This is the beginning of the worldwide expansion of Europe and some of its languages. Before this point, languages almost always spread along land routes, and the results are regional: large languages are spoken across coherent, centred regions. After this point, the sea becomes the main thoroughfare of language advance, and spread can be global: a language can be spoken in distinct zones on many different continents, with its currency linked only by the sinews of trade and military governance that stretch across the oceans.

除了地理上的差异之外，还可以看到其他一些区分这两个时代的显著特征。

Besides this geographical difference, it is possible to see other gross patterns which distinguish the two epochs.

1492年以前，语言传播的关键力量首先是识字率和公民文化，其次是宗教启示。但当一个社群拥有这些优势时，其语言的传播往往依赖于武力；而缺乏这些优势，军事胜利或商业发展都难以取得显著成效。语言传播的一般方式是通过渗透：整个民族不会迁徙，而是由迁徙的小社群和零散的殖民地传播。然而，英语的形成——它正是在这一时期诞生的——似乎是所有这一切的例外。

Before 1492, the key forces that spread languages are first literacy and civic culture, and later revealed religion. But when a community has these advantages its language is often spread at the point of a sword; without them, military victories or commercial development will achieve little. The general mode of spread is through infiltration: whole peoples do not move, but languages are transmitted by small communities and piecemeal colonies which do. But the foundation of English, which occurs in this period, appears to be an exception to all this.

1492年之后，语言传播的力量最初更多地体现在自然层面：疾病肆虐美洲及其他地区，征服者与受害者之间的技术差距远比区域传播时期更为悬殊。然而，随着欧洲全球军事帝国的稳定，权力平衡逐渐恢复，军事、商业和语言的主导地位变得难以区分。起初，旅行困难重重，语言传播缓慢，主要依靠渗透。但随着识字率的提高和交通运输成本的降低，语言传播模式转向了移民，因为庞大的欧洲人口都希望抓住新的机遇。到了20世纪，这种趋势有所缓和；但新的沟通方式不断涌现，速度更快、成本更低、覆盖面更广：最终，语言传播的主要模式从移民转向了扩散。英语再次成为例外，因为它得天独厚地率先利用了新技术，但随着其他语言，无论大小，都逐渐跟进，英语的前景变得不再明朗。它面临着所有一夜成名者都无法避免的不确定未来，或许也面临着这种未来不可避免的最终结局。这尤其因为，对于世界领先的通用语而言，语言共同体的概念开始瓦解。

After 1492, the forces of spread are at first much more elemental: disease devastates populations in the Americas and elsewhere, and the technological gap between conquerors and victims is everywhere much starker than it had been in the era of regional spread. But once the power balance moves back into equilibrium, with the stabilisation of the Europeans’ global military empires, it becomes hard to distinguish military, commercial and linguistic dominance. At first, travel is difficult, and language spread is slow, still based on infiltration. However, with the spread of literacy and cheaper transport, the mode switches to migration, as large European populations seek to take advantage of the new opportunities. In the twentieth century, this too eases off; but new forms of communication arise, continually becoming faster, cheaper and more comprehensive: the result is that the dominant mode of language spread switches from migration to diffusion. English is once again exceptional, as it has been uniquely poised to take first advantage of the new technologies, but its prospects remain less clear as the other languages, both large and small, settle in behind it. It faces the uncertain future of any instant celebrity, and perhaps too the same inevitable ultimate outcome of such a future. This is not least because, for the world’s leading lingua franca, the whole concept of a language community begins to break down.

但是，一旦了解了世界上使用人数最多的几种语言的各种故事，我们的探究就可以继续提出一些相关的问题。

But once informed with the varied stories of the world’s largest languages, our inquiry can move on to ask some pertinent questions.

现代语言传播的力量究竟有多么新颖和前所未有？它们与过去的语言传播方式有哪些显著的共同特征？

How new and unprecedented are modern forces of language diffusion? Do they share significant properties with language spread in the past?

语言社群的古老特征将如何展现？特别是，所有语言还能继续作为社群的外在象征吗？它们还能有效地将源于共同经验的各种联想编织在一起吗？每种语言还能继续创造自己的世界吗？当科学——以及某些启示宗教——宣称其具有普世价值时，它们还会愿意这样做吗？

How will the age-old characteristics of language communities assert themselves? In particular, can all languages still act as outward symbols of communities? And can they effectively weave together the tissues of associations which come from a shared experience? Can each language still create its own world? Will they want to, when science—and some revealed religions—claim universal validity?

这些是我们想要提出的问题。但首先，我们必须研究浩瀚的人类语言史资料。

These are the questions we shall want to ask. But first we must examine the vast materials of human language history.

^因此，它在形成当今排名前二十的语言社区中占据重要地位，这在本书的结尾部分值得一提（见第 527 页）。

^*As such it is prominent in forming the present-day Top Twenty language communities, to be considered close to the conclusion of this book (see p. 527).

^†英语在欧盟的广泛使用可以看作是扩散，而渗透（在英国于 1973 年加入欧盟之后）则强化了这种扩散。

^†The widespread use of English in the European Union can be seen as Diffusion reinforced (after the UK’s accession in 1973) by Infiltration.

^*这也是个本身就很危险的术语，很难将其与对整个民族成就进行一概而论的评价区分开来。（例如，参见麦考利对梵语和阿拉伯语文化的臭名昭著的评价（参见第12章“视角转变——印度的英语”，第496页）。）

^* It is also an inherently dangerous term, hard to separate from sweeping attempts to evaluate the achievements of whole peoples. (See, e.g., Macaulay’s notorious verdict on Sanskrit- and Arabic-based cultures (see Chapter 12, ‘Changing perspective—English in India’, p. 496).)

^这导致我们完全忽略了两个重要的已知语言传播事件和一个推测的传播事件。波利尼西亚群岛在公元前3000年起的四千年间，或许是人类历史上最勇敢、最持久的探索，孕育了数十种密切相关的语言。班图语系也在几乎相同的时期内传播到南部非洲，从喀麦隆开始，最终到达好望角。这两个故事对于理解当今世界语言的完整模式至关重要，但它们完全基于考古学和语言学比较。对于那漫长岁月的语言交流，我们没有留下任何文字记录。至于印欧语系的地理传播路径——这种被重构的祖先语言被用来解释赫梯语、梵语、俄语、亚美尼亚语、希腊语、拉丁语、高卢语、立陶宛语和英语等众多语言之间显而易见的系统性联系——我们只能进行推测，而这些推测属于历史语言学的范畴，而非语言史的范畴。

^* This has led to the total omission of two important known language spreads, and one conjectured one. The Polynesian islands gained their dozens of closely related languages over the four millennia from 3000 BC in perhaps the most intrepid sustained exploration ever. And the Bantu languages spread across southern Africa over much the same period, beginning in Cameroon and ending at the Cape. Both of these stories are crucial to understanding the full pattern of languages in today’s world, but they are based purely on archaeology and linguistic comparisons. We have not a single word recorded from all the talk of those aeons. As for the geographical path of Indo-European, the ancestral language that is reconstructed to make sense of the evident systematic relationships among Hittite, Sanskrit, Russian, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Gaulish, Lithuanian and English, and many, many more, we can only speculate, and those speculations are the stuff of historical linguistics, not of language history.

第二部分

陆路语言

PART II

LANGUAGES BY LAND

相隔十五个世纪的两种意大利观点，探讨了强制推行通用语言的价值：

Two Italian opinions, separated by fifteen centuries, on the value of an imposed common language:

nec ignoro ingrati et segnis animi Existimari posse Merito si, obiter atque in transcursu ad hunc modum dicatur terraomnium terrarum alumna eadem et parens, numine deum electa quae caelum ipsum clariusfaceret, sparsa congregaret imperia ritusque molliret et tot populorum discordes ferasque linguas商业布道和座谈会和人道人道，在托托·奥贝·帕特里亚·菲雷特（toto orbe patria fieret）中简述为万能的。

nec ignoro ingrati et segnis animi existimari posse merito si, obiter atque in transcursu ad hunc modum dicatur terra omnium terrarum alumna eadem et parens, numine deum electa quae caelum ipsum clarius faceret, sparsa congregaret imperia ritusque molliret et tot populorum discordes ferasque linguas sermonis commercio contraheret ad colloquia et humanitatem homini daret, breviterque una cunctarum gentium in toto orbe patria fieret.

我知道，如果我如此轻描淡写地提及这片土地，人们可能会认为我忘恩负义、懒惰成性。这片土地既是所有土地的养子，又是所有土地的养母；它受天意召唤，使天空更加明亮，将遥远的领土连接起来，使他们的生活方式文明化，通过共同使用其语言，使所有民族的野蛮、好争吵的语言能够进行对话，为人类带来文化，简而言之，成为世界上每个民族的祖国。

I am aware that I may be quite rightly thought thankless and lazy if I touch so lightly on that land which is both the foster-child and parent of all lands, called by Providence to make the very sky brighter, to bring together its far-flung domains, to civilise their ways of life, to unite in conversation the wild, quarrelsome tongues of all their many peoples through common use of its language, to give culture to mankind, and in short to become the one fatherland of every nation in the world.

老普林尼（公元24-79年），《博物志》，第三卷，第39章

Pliny the Elder (AD 24-79), Naturalis Historia, iii.39

被征服的民族更容易摆脱武器的枷锁，而不是语言的枷锁。

The yoke of arms is shaken off more readily by subject peoples than the yoke of language.

归因于意大利人文主义者 Lorenzo Valla（1406-57 年）

在其Elegantiarum Libri VI中

attributed to Lorenzo Valla, Italian humanist (1406-57),

in his Elegantiarum Libri VI

3

沙漠之花：中东的语言创新

3

The Desert Blooms: Language Innovation in the Middle East

ayu ém ilī	qereb šamě ilammad
milik ša anzanunzî	我akkim mannu
ēkšma ilmada	alakti ili apšti
ša ina amšat iblu u	imūt uddeš
surriš uštādir	zamar u tabar
在ibit 应用程序中	izammur elī la
在 pīt purīdi	u sarrap lallariš
kī petě u katāmi	ēnšina Šitni
免疫阿玛	immš šalamtíš
伊什布什马	išannana ilšin
ina ābi itammš	elš šamā 'i
ūtaššašama idabbuba	阿拉德·伊尔卡拉
ana annāta ušta-	qerebšina la altanda

谁能知晓天上诸神的旨意？

谁能理解冥界诸神的谋略？

人间从何处习得神之道？

昨日尚在人间，今日已然死去。

前一刻忧虑，下一刻便喧闹。

前一刻歌唱欢歌，

后一刻便哀嚎如丧家之人。

他们的境遇变幻莫测，如同双腿开合。

饥饿时如死尸般麻木，

饱足时却反抗神明。

顺境时谈及攀登天堂，

逆境时却诉说堕入地狱。

这一切令我困惑不解，我实在无法理解。

Who can know the will of the gods in heaven?

Who can understand the plans of the underworld gods?

Where have humans learned the way of a god?

He who was alive yesterday is dead today.

One moment he is worried, the next he is boisterous.

One moment he is singing a joyful song,

A moment later he wails like a funeral mourner.

Their condition changes like opening and closing [the legs].

When starving they become like corpses,

When full they oppose their god.

In good times they speak of scaling heaven,

When they are troubled they talk of descent to hell.

I am perplexed at these things; I cannot tell what they mean.

来自Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi，“我将赞美智慧之主”，阿卡德语¹

from Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi, ‘I will Praise the Lord of Wisdom’, Akkadian¹

古代近东兴起的文明之名，如今听起来都带着遥远的古老气息。已知有三十多个文明在公元前3300年左右有文字记载到公元前330年亚历山大入侵的三千年间繁荣发展，其中包括巴比伦、亚述、腓尼基、吕底亚和波斯等强国。它们让人联想起东方专制主义、令人窒息的残酷和华丽的辉煌。尽管它们拥有诸多野心，文化底蕴深厚，有时甚至拥有真正的世界性力量，但它们却没有留下任何继承者。至少有一位它们的先贤预见到了这一点：

The names of civilisations that arose in the ancient Near East now ring with the note of remote antiquity. Three dozen and more are known that flourished in the three millennia from the start of records c.3300 BC until the invasion of Alexander in 330 BC, among them such powers as Babylon, Assyria, Phoenicia, Lydia and Persia. They bring to mind visions of oriental absolutism, breathtaking ruthlessness and gaudy magnificence. Despite their many pretensions, their cultural fertility and sometimes truly universal power, they have left no heirs. Something of this was foreseen by at least one of their own writers:

阿拉德·米坦古拉尼

arad mitanguranni

annŭ bēlī annŭ

umma usātu ana mātia luppuš kimi

epuš bēlī epuš

amēlu ša usātam ana mātišu ipuš

šakna usātu-šu in kippat ša marduk

e arad anāku usātamma ana mātia ul epuš

la teppuš bēlī la teppuš

伊利玛·伊娜·穆·伊蒂拉尼·拉比鲁蒂·伊塔拉克

ilīma ina mui tillāni labīrūti itallak

amur gulgullē ša arkŭti u panŭti

amur gulgullē ša arkŭti u pānŭti

ayyu bēl lemuttima ayu bēl usāti

仆人，听我说。

Servant, listen to me.

是的，主人，是的。

Yes, master, yes.

我将为我的国家做出贡献。

I will benefit my country.

师傅，照做吧。

So do, master, do.

为国家做出贡献的人

The man who benefits his country

他的善行被记录在马尔杜克的[记录]中。

has his good deeds set down in the [record] of Marduk.

不，仆人，我不会为我的国家做出贡献。

No, servant, I will not benefit my country.

主人，不要这样做，不要这样做。

Do not do it, master, do not.

走到古代废墟堆那里，四处走走；

Go up to the ancient ruin heaps and walk around;

看看卑微者和伟人的头骨。

look at the skulls of the lowly and the great.

哪一个属于作恶的人，哪一个属于行善的人？

Which belongs to one who did evil, and which to one who did good?

出自《悲观主义对话录》，阿卡德语²

from ‘The Dialogue of Pessimism’, Akkadian²

但或许，在两到四千年的时空之后，就政治成就的持久性来评判其价值未免有些苛刻。他们的一些成就的确经受住了时间的考验。正是在这里，文字被发明出来，并从最初的笔记工具发展成为完整、清晰地记录人类生活和思想的基础；幸运的是，当时人们采用了一种储量丰富且不可降解的材料——河泥——来书写。这种泥板被擀开、刻字，有时还会被烘烤硬化。因此，我们不仅可以追溯事件的大致轮廓，还能了解王室成员的性格乃至外交对话，了解各民族神祇的神话传说和仪式及其形象，了解他们所遵循的法律和吟唱的情歌，以及最重要的，他们丰富多彩的语言。

But perhaps it is a little harsh to weigh up the persistence of political achievements after a gap of two to four millennia. Some of their works really did defy the ages. It was here that writing was invented, and developed from a medium for taking notes into the basis for a full, explicit record of human life and thought; as a lucky complement to this, a plentiful and non-biodegradable material had been adopted to write on, patties of river clay, rolled out, inscribed, and sometimes baked hard. As a result we can trace not just the broad outlines of events, but the personalities and even the diplomatic dialogue of royal families, the myths and rituals of the peoples’ gods as well as their images, the laws under which they lived and the love songs they sang, and above all their multifarious languages.

这份最后的馈赠，对于近两百年的考古学而言，无疑是一份天赐之礼。因为在这一地区的民族中，只有西部的希伯来人和东部的伊朗人拥有流传至今的文献和文化传统。然而，他们的经文，如《旧约》和《阿维斯塔经》，以及像希腊史学家希罗多德这样的旁观者所作的传闻——这些十八世纪学者所能获取的全部资料——只能提供非常片面的视角，而且仅仅展现了事件的后期阶段，完全无法了解当时参与者的言论。

This last gift is a particular godsend of the last two hundred years of archaeology, since among the peoples of the area only the Hebrews on the western margin and the Iranians on the east have texts and cultural traditions that have survived to modern times. Yet their scriptures, the Old Testament and the Zend-Avesta, supplemented by the hearsay of bystanders such as the Greek Herodotus—all that was available to eighteenth-century scholars—give a very partial view, and that only of the latter stages of what was done, with no sense at all of what was said by those who did it.

如果没有十九世纪欧洲人发现可以通过挖掘进行历史研究，以及他们英勇地运用当时新兴的破译和语言重建技术来解读出土文物，我们对苏美尔和埃兰的建城之城、从高加索地区不断扩张的乌拉尔图帝国，以及赫梯人在如今土耳其的辉煌历史都将一无所知。这些民族各自使用的语言都与邻近民族的语言截然不同，暗示着他们有着截然不同的起源，以及在更为遥远的过去中蕴藏的无数不为人知的故事。令人惊叹的是，尽管许多民族都使用同一种文字——由楔形符号构成——但这种文字却清晰地展现了语言的多样性。尽管这种文字最初的设计目的是为了表达词义，而非发音。

Without nineteenth-century Europe’s discovery that it could do historical research through digging, and the novel skills of decipherment and language reconstruction then heroically applied to what was unearthed, we should know nothing at all of the founding cities in Sumer and Elam, the steadily expanding might of Urartu from the Caucasus, or the pre-eminence of Hittites in what is now Turkey. Each of these groups spoke a language quite unrelated to that of its neighbours, hinting at radically different origins, and a wealth of unknown stories in their even more remote past. This fact of different languages amazingly shines through the single script that so many of them used, based on patterns of wedge-shaped marks, even though it was originally designed to represent the meanings of words rather than how they sounded.

这是一个在语言创新方面创造诸多世界第一的地区。与埃及、中国或印度不同，这里的城市和邦国一直以来都自觉地采用多种语言，无论是为了与讲不同语言的邻国交流，还是因为历史原因，它们都曾采用外语来彰显宫廷、宗教或商业的尊严。在这里，我们发现了古典语言的首次有意识使用；但与之形成鲜明对比的是，这里也首次出现了为了方便交流而广泛使用一种完全外语作为通用语的案例，这显然是外交实用主义战胜民族情感的早期例证。

This is a region of so many world firsts for linguistic innovation. Unlike Egypt, China or India, its cities and states had always been consciously multilingual, whether for communication with neighbours who spoke different languages, or because their histories had made them adopt a foreign language to dignify court, religion or commerce. This is the area where we find the first conscious use of a classical language; but also, by contrast, the first generalised use of a totally foreign language for convenience in communication, as a lingua franca, an early apparent triumph of diplomatic pragmatism over national sentiment.

这一区域位于幼发拉底河下游河谷，是已知最早的文字遗址所在地。但在其西部地区，即叙利亚沿海城市，亚述也率先实现了文字的彻底简化，从表示词语和音节的象形文字简化为代表简单发音的简短字母。这一变革的政治影响巨大。识字能力首次得以突破贵族文士阶层的局限，不再局限于那些童年时期有闲暇学习古老复杂文字体系的人；亚述帝国的权力和影响力也由此向更广泛的社会阶层敞开。

This area contains the site of the earliest known writing, in the lower reaches of the Euphrates valley. But in its western zone, in the coastal cities of Syria, it was also the first to make the radical simplification from hieroglyphs that denoted words and syllables to a short alphabet that represented simple sounds. The political effects of this were massive. For the first time, literacy could spread beyond the aristocratic scribal class, the people who had leisure in childhood to learn the old, complicated, system; positions of power and influence throughout the Assyrian empire were then opened to a wider social range.

该地区还拥有已知最早的博物馆和图书馆，它们通常是国家设立的集中式多语种机构。然而，命运弄人，也正因如此，这个以黏土为生的社会的文献得以保存得最为完好：最直接的保存方式是焚毁，通常是通过存放文献的建筑物发生火灾——这种情况在其动荡的历史中并不罕见。这些灾难性事件反而成为了文献保存的奇迹，将整座图书馆原封不动地保存了下来，有时甚至连分类都完好无损，极大地帮助我们这个时代快速了解许多鲜为人知的历史。

The area also contains the first known museums and libraries, often centralised, multilingual institutions of the state. But by an irony of fate which has favoured the memory of this clay-based society, its documents were best preserved by firing, most simply through conflagrations in the buildings in which they were held, a circumstance that was not uncommon in its tempestuous history. These catastrophes were miracles of conservation, archiving whole libraries in situ, on occasion with even their classification intact, and have materially helped the rapid reading of much unknown history in our era.

并非所有地区都局限于新月沃土——这片水源充足的区域从底格里斯河和幼发拉底河谷向上延伸，环绕托罗斯山脉南坡，直至叙利亚和巴勒斯坦的地中海沿岸。腓尼基城邦从巴勒斯坦西海岸向四面八方派遣贸易探险队，主要活动范围在地中海地区。其成果之一是迦太基的建立，由此诞生了世界上第一个殖民帝国，而这正是使英语成为全球通用语言的那种制度的雏形。其他成果还包括（奉埃及法老之命）首次环游非洲，以及发现通往英国（用于开采锡矿）和波罗的海（用于开采琥珀）的航道。在此过程中，腓尼基人将字母文字传播到其贸易中心网络，这或许是开启其主要竞争对手——希腊人和罗马人——发展进程的最重要钥匙。最终，希腊人和罗马人取代腓尼基人，成为地中海的霸主。

Not all the states of the area stayed focused within the Fertile Crescent, the zone of well-watered land that runs from the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates up round the southern slopes of the Taurus mountains and down the Mediterranean coasts of Syria and Palestine. From the western coast of Palestine, the cities of Phoenicia sent trading expeditions far and wide, mostly within the Mediterranean. One result was the foundation of Carthage, and hence the world’s first colonial empire, precursor of the kind of institution that has made English a global language. Others were the first circumnavigation of Africa (on behalf of the Egyptian pharaoh), and the discovery of navigable routes to Britain for tin, and the Baltic Sea for amber. On the way, the Phoenicians spread the practice of alphabetic writing throughout their network of trading emporia, providing perhaps the most important single key to unlock the progress of their great rivals, the Greeks and the Romans, who would ultimately supplant them as masters of the Mediterranean.

用“世界公民”来形容这个中东社会最为贴切，但它的世界从来就不是与世隔绝的。便捷的通讯和缺乏天然边界使得任何一种文化都难以长期保持统治地位。我们发现，来自四面八方、语言各异的王国接连不断地争夺着如今伊拉克所在的中心地带。经过三千年有记载的权力更迭，最终控制权落入远在异乡的势力手中：西方的希腊人，后来是罗马人；东方的帕提亚人，来自伊朗东北角。然而，这些外来势力也未能有效地维护该地区的稳定：阿拉伯人、蒙古人和土耳其人先后统治了数个世纪，而二十世纪更是该地区历史上冲突最为激烈的时期。

The best word for this Middle Eastern society is cosmopolitan, citizens of the world, but its world was never a sheltered one. Good communications and absence of natural borders made it difficult for any culture to hold power stably. We find a succession of kingdoms coming from every different direction, and (it turns out) many different language families, to seize control of the central area that is modern Iraq. After three thousand documented years of shifting power balances within the region, control was yielded to groups based far away, the Greeks and later the Romans from the west, then the Parthians from the north-eastern corner of Iran in the east. But these foreign powers were no more effective in achieving stability: Arabs, Mongols and Turks have succeeded one another through the centuries of the modern era, with the twentieth century from start to finish being a particularly bitterly contested period in its history.

三姐妹，跨越4500年的历史

Three sisters who span the history of 4500 years

这个社会唯一享有的稳定，在于其统治语言的实质。公元前2300年，第一位亚述国王萨尔贡一世所使用的阿卡德语，与公元2000年其继任者萨达姆·侯赛因在同一片土地上所使用的阿拉伯语密切相关；另一个密切相关的语言，中东古老的通用语阿拉姆语，则弥合了公元前600年左右阿卡德语衰落与公元600年左右穆斯林兴起阿拉伯语之间的鸿沟。它们都是闪米特语系中关系密切的姐妹语言^。

The only stability this society has enjoyed has been in the substance of its ruling language. Akkadian, the language spoken by Sargon I, the first Assyrian king in 2300 BC, is a close relative of the Arabic spoken by his successor in this same land, Saddam Hussein, in AD 2000; another close relative, the Middle East’s old lingua franca, Aramaic, bridges the gap between the decline of Akkadian around 600 BC and the onset of Arabic with the Muslims around AD 600. They are all sister languages within the very close Semitic family.^*

它们有很多共同的显著特征。它们的辅音发音时喉咙会收缩（称为声门化或咽化）。阴性词以 -at 结尾。名词词形变化只有两三种：形容词以-ī结尾，名词以m-前缀结尾；动词形式区分动态时态和静态时态——动态时态用前缀表示人称，静态时态用后缀表示人称。最重要的是，闪米特语系语言具有高度屈折变化的特点，其独特的屈折系统使得词的辅音骨架具有独立于其间元音和辅音变化模式的意义：举个最简单的例子，在阿卡德语中，词根k-š-d（意为“捕捉”）可以体现在kašādu（意为“获得，捕捉”）、ikaššadu（意为“他们正在捕捉”）、kišidtu（意为“战利品”）和kuššudu（意为“俘获”）中；正如š-pr（意为“命令”）体现在šapāru（意为“发送，统治，书写”）和šipirtu（意为“使命，信件”）中一样；而š-lm （意为“休息”）则体现在šalāmu（意为“健康”）、šalimtu（意为“和平”）和šulmu中。 “和平、问候、休息、日落”。

They have many distinctive points in common. They have consonants pronounced with constriction of the throat (said to be glottalised or pharyngealised). Feminine words end in -at. There are only two or three cases in noun inflexion; there is an ending in -ī to make adjectives, and a prefix m- to make nouns; there is distinction in verbal forms between dynamic and stative tenses—dynamic have prefixes to mark the persons, but stative have suffixes. Above all, Semitic languages are highly inflected, using a distinctive system in which the consonantal skeleton of the word has a meaning independent of the varying patterns of vowels and consonants that may come between them: to give the simplest of examples, in Akkadian, the root k-š-d, ‘catch’, can be discerned in kašādu, ‘to attain, catch’, ikaššadu, ‘they were catching’, kišidtu, ‘booty’, and kuššudu, ‘captured’, just as š-p-r, ‘order’, is reflected in šapāru, ‘to send, rule, write’, and šipirtu, ‘mission, letter’, and š-l-m, ‘rest’, in šalāmu, ‘to be well’, šalimtu, ‘peace’, and šulmu, ‘peace, greeting, rest, sunset’.

除了涵盖古代和现代中东的主要语言外，闪米特语系还包括埃塞俄比亚和厄立特里亚一些人口最多的语言，包括阿姆哈拉语、提格雷语、提格里尼亚语和埃塞俄比亚教会的古语吉兹语。

Besides covering the major languages of the ancient and modern Middle East, the Semitic group also takes in some of the most populous languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, including Amharic, Tigre, Tigrinya and the ancient language of the Ethiopian Church, Ge’ez.

事实上，这些闪米特语与一个更大的语族——亚非语系或含闪语系——共享大部分特征，该语族包括埃及语、柏柏尔语以及一些分布在更南方的语系，如库希特语系、奥莫语系和乍得语系（包括如今庞大的豪萨语）。它们都通行于非洲北部，人们通常认为这里也是闪米特语的起源地。然而，实际上有一些间接证据表明，在史前时期，曾发生过大规模的部落迁徙，而非语言在邻近地区间的简单传播：在某些方面，阿卡德语和埃塞俄比亚语比它们之间的其他闪米特语系语言更为相似；公元前3500年左右撒哈拉沙漠的迅速沙漠化也为^人们迁出北非提供了合理的动机。

These Semitic languages in fact share most of these properties with a larger group, called Afro-Asiatic or Hamito-Semitic, which includes Egyptian, Berber and some language families spoken farther south, Cushitic, Omotic and Chadic (including the now vast Hausa language). They are all spoken in northerly parts of Africa, and the usual assumption is that this is the primeval home of the Semitic languages too. There is in fact some indirect evidence of a mass movement of tribes at a prehistoric date, rather than simple diffusion of the languages among neighbours: in certain ways Akkadian and Ethiopic are more alike than their intervening Semitic cousins; and the rampant desertification of the Sahara c.3500 BC would have provided a fair motive to be moving out of North Africa.³

总之，大约在公元前2400年，当我们首次在他们自己的历史记录中发现闪米特语时， ^*在肥沃新月地带北缘，大致位于现代叙利亚的边界上，已经出现了使用闪米特语（根据现有证据，他们也拥有文字记录）的中心城镇。这些城镇从埃勃拉（阿勒颇以南60公里）经纳巴达（泰勒·贝达尔，哈萨克以北20公里），一直延伸到幼发拉底河畔的马里（靠近阿布·卡迈勒）和基什（巴比伦正东15公里）。（基什的统治者的名字表明，那里曾是闪米特人和苏美尔人混居的聚居地。）所有这些社群都坚定地使用苏美尔语的表意符号作为楔形文字的主要形式，但其语言明显带有闪米特语的特征，使用音标符号来表示动词和名词的词尾以及功能词，并且语序也与苏美尔语不同。还有一些双语学校教材，其中详细说明了至少部分苏美尔语象形文字的发音。埃布拉语的书写形式似乎并不统一，而且通常很难与阿卡德语的早期形式区分开来，后者出现在基什以及萨尔贡一世于24世纪征服苏美尔之后的地区。

At any rate, by the time we first encounter them in their own historical record, about 2400 BC,^* there are Semitic language speakers (and by the nature of the evidence, writers) in centres dotted along the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent, pretty much on the borders of modern Syria, from Ebla (60 kilometres south of Aleppo) through Nabada (Tell Beydar, 20 kilometres north of Al Hasake) and down to Mari on the Euphrates (near Abu Kamal) and Kish (15 kilometres due east of Babylon). (The names of the kings who ruled at Kish suggest that it was a mixed settlement of Semites with Sumerians.) All these communities were steadfastly using Sumerian logograms as the staple of their cuneiform script, but the language is discernibly Semitic, written with phonetic symbols to show the verb and noun endings and function words, and in a different word order from Sumerian. There are also bilingual school texts which specify how at least some of the Sumerian logograms should be pronounced. The language of Ebla does not seem to be written very consistently, and is in general difficult to differentiate from early forms of Akkadian, occurring in Kish and down in Sumer after the conquests of Sargon I in the twenty-fourth century.

这些征服是政治统一的最早历史证据，但它们主要统一的是原本就说着密切相关的闪米特语方言的人们。因此，中东的语言史开篇就已展现出其主导地位：以苏美尔楔形文字书写的闪米特语。我们并不清楚闪米特语使用者是如何到达那里的，也不清楚他们那些高度统一的方言（或语言）是如何传播到整个新月沃土的。从地图上看，叙利亚和阿拉伯的沙漠似乎是扩张的理想中心点——但要想象在那里积累所需的大量剩余人口，似乎是不可能的。

These conquests are the first historical evidence of political unification, but mostly they unified people who were already speaking closely related Semitic dialects. The language history of the Middle East opens therefore with its leading player already on stage, Semitic written in Sumerian cuneiform. We do not know how the Semitic speakers had got there, how their remarkably unified dialects (or languages) had spread out to cover the whole Fertile Crescent. On the map, the deserts of Syria and Arabia look like good central points from which to start an expansion—but they seem inconceivable as areas in which to bring up the necessary large surplus populations.

由于闪米特语系语言的持续存在，可以证明，在四千多年（两百代）的时间里，这里数到十的方式几乎没有改变：^†

As one result of Semitic language persistence, it can be shown that counting to ten has hardly changed here in over four thousand years, or two hundred generations:^†

故事梗概：语言飞跃

The story in brief: Language leapfrog

'al tha šwî la 'rabî yāmš ūl îdōnî bārš

kî 'šbîdathem prîsš

’al thašwî la ’rabî yāmš ūlîdōnî bārš

kî ’šbîdathem prîsš

不要让阿拉伯人见大海，也不要让西顿人见沙漠，因为他们的工作不同。

Do not show an Arab the sea nor a Sidonian the desert; for their work is different.

阿拉姆语：《阿希卡尔箴言》110 ⁴

Aramaic: Proverbs of Ahiqar, 110⁴

近东——更准确地说，是西南亚——的语言史无需重构：它自公元前四千纪晚期以来就记载于自身的文献之中。这段历史充满了引人入胜的细节，尤其是在语言和文化方面，但其跨越五千年的叙事曲折离奇，令人难以把握脉络。我们将首先简要概述从苏美尔人到阿拉伯人等主要语言，并将它们置于从伊拉克到巴勒斯坦的肥沃新月地带中心区域；然后，我们将更详细地探讨它们对我们理解语言发展历程的具体贡献。

The language history of the Near East—more objectively, of South-West Asia—does not need to be reconstructed: it is told in its own documents, from the late fourth millennium BC. It is brimming with interesting details, especially with linguistic and cultural firsts, but there are so many twists and turns in a narrative that takes in five thousand years that it is hard to keep one’s bearings. We shall start with a very brief run-through of the major players, from Sumerian to Arabic, situating them around the central area of the Fertile Crescent from Iraq to Palestine; then we return to look in more detail at their particular contributions to our understanding of languages through time.

故事的核心是位于幼发拉底河口波斯湾的那个充满活力的中心。随着几个世纪的流逝，这个中心的影响力不断扩张，先是向北，然后向西，邻近的民族也开始关注这里，建立起各自新的、往往更强大的中心。最终，故事演变成美索不达米亚、安纳托利亚、伊朗和叙利亚之间争夺影响力（以及语言）的斗争；而故事的背景也扩展到了西部的希腊和埃及，以及东部的阿富汗和印度。故事的结局并非一次，而是两次，两次席卷而来的征服导致了语言的剧变：第一次是来自北方的希腊人，第二次是来自南方的阿拉伯人。

The overall focus of the story is on its pulsating centre at the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf. As the centuries roll by, the centre’s influence expands, first north, then westward, and neighbouring peoples come to take an interest, creating new, and often stronger, centres of their own, until the story becomes a struggle between the contending influence (and languages) of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Iran and Syria; and the frame of reference has expanded to the borders of Greece and Egypt in the west, and Afghanistan and India in the east. The finale comes not once but twice, in two sweeping conquests that lead to linguistic cataclysm, first by Greek from the north, and then by Arabic from the south.

故事伊始，波斯湾上游毗邻而居着两个拥有文字的文明：一个是位于底格里斯河与幼发拉底河交汇处的苏美尔，即圣经中提到的“示拿之地”；另一个是位于东部沼泽地带的埃兰，介于扎格罗斯山脉和大海之间。与其说它们是一个国家，不如说它们是由一群说着同一种语言的城镇和村庄组成的聚集地。苏美尔语的起源至今仍是个谜；然而，埃兰语似乎与达罗毗荼语有关，因此在古代与布拉灰语（至今仍有超过200万人在巴基斯坦西部使用）以及印度中部和南部使用的许多其他语言都有关联^。

When the story opens, there are two cultures with the skill of writing, next door to each other in the upper reaches of the Persian Gulf: Sumer, the Biblical ‘land of Shin‘ar’ at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and Elam, across the marshes to the east, between the Zagros mountains and the sea. Each was not so much a state as a gathering of towns and villages of people speaking a common language. The origins of Sumerian are quite unknown; Elamite, however, appears to be related to Dravidian, and so linked anciently with Brahui, still spoken by over 2 million in the west of Pakistan, and many more languages spoken in central and southern India.⁵

苏美尔和埃兰这两个文明似乎都独立地发明了各自的文字系统，而且时间大致相同（大约在公元前31世纪）。但苏美尔的历史影响力远超埃兰。埃兰的语言保留了三千多年（在公元第一个千年后期，它是波斯帝国的三大官方语言之一），然而早在公元前2400年左右，人们就发现了用苏美尔风格的楔形文字书写的埃兰语，而埃兰本土的文字在接下来的几个世纪里就消亡了。苏美尔文字的这种文化传播实际上遍及整个新月沃土：同样，到了公元前2400年，我们在距离埃兰1000公里、位于今叙利亚地中海沿岸的埃勃拉的铭文中也发现了常见的苏美尔词汇和楔形文字符号。埃勃拉语是一种闪米特语，与阿卡德语类似，其语音系统和形态结构从现代视角来看，使得苏美尔语作为文字的基础显得相当笨拙：然而，苏美尔符号的表达力却令人无法抗拒。

Both these cultures seem to have invented their writing systems independently, and approximately at the same time (around the thirty-first century BC). But Sumer was destined for a much more influential history than Elam. Elam did retain its language for over three thousand years (it was one of the three official media of the Persian empire in the late first millennium), yet already around 2400 Elamite is found written in Sumerian-style cuneiform, and its local script died out in the next couple of centuries. This cultural spread of Sumerian writing was actually occurring all over the Fertile Crescent: likewise by 2400 we find Sumerian words and cuneiform symbols common in inscriptions in Ebla, 1000 kilometres away on the Mediterranean coast of modern Syria. Eblaite was a Semitic language, like Akkadian, with a sound system and a morphological structure that, from a modern standpoint, makes Sumerian really quite awkward as a basis for writing: nevertheless the expressive power of Sumerian symbols was irresistible.

政治上，形势则完全相反。苏美尔人自身也在稍晚一些时候（公元前2334-2200年）被北方讲阿卡德语的邻居所统治，当时萨尔贡王——更准确地说是沙鲁金（Šarrukîn），意为“正义之王”——确立了自己的统治地位。尽管阿卡德帝国在几代人之后被来自东北部库提翁的入侵者推翻，而苏美尔人在乌尔城的领导下，于八十年后重获独立，但从此以后，美索不达米亚南部便以“苏美尔和阿卡德之地”的共同名称为人所知^。

Politically, the boot was on the other foot. The Sumerians themselves were dominated a little later (2334-2200) by their Akkadian-speaking neighbours to the north when King Sargon—or more accurately Šarrukîn, ‘the righteous king’—imposed himself. Although this Akkadian empire was overthrown after a few generations by invaders from Qutium in the north-east, and the Sumerians, spearheaded by the city of Ur, were able eighty years later to reclaim their independence, southern Mesopotamia was henceforth known to all under the joint name of ‘the land of Sumer and Akkad’.^*

公元前三千年末，苏美尔最伟大的城市乌尔被来自西北部的游牧民族阿摩利人攻陷，此后，一种新的格局开始形成：在接下来的1500年里，这片土地在以阿卡德语为母语的王朝统治下周期性地统一，这些王朝分别以南方的巴比伦和北方的亚述为中心进行统治。然而，每隔几个世纪，这些王朝的统治就会因内部权力斗争或来自东西方的入侵而中断。尽管这些入侵可能持续很长时间，例如公元前1570年喀西特人占领巴比伦后，入侵持续了四百年之久，但它们从未对语言产生重大影响。就像后来征服中国北方的突厥人，或是推翻罗马对西欧统治的日耳曼人一样，这些入侵者都接受了被征服者的语言。大约从公元前2000年起，阿卡德语成为该地区唯一的通用语言。但苏美尔语并没有被遗忘。它向高端市场转型，并在书面语言方面保持了影响力。巴比伦和亚述作为美索不达米亚的两大强国，持续了一千五百年之久，彼此之间经常残酷地竞争，但却说着同一种语言的不同方言。

When at the end of the third millennium Ur, the greatest Sumerian city, fell to more Semitic speakers, this time nomadic Amorites from the north-west, a new pattern set in: for the next 1500 years the land was periodically unified under Akkadian-speaking dynasties ruling from Babylon in the south or Assyria in the north, only to have their power disrupted every few centuries by power struggles between them, or invasions from the west or east. The invasions, although they might last a long time, notably four hundred years after the Kassites took control of Babylon in 1570 BC, never had any great linguistic effect. Like the various Turks who would conquer north China, or the Germans who were to topple Roman control of western Europe, these were all invaders who acquiesced in their victims’ languages. From about 2000 BC, Akkadian had become the only language spoken throughout the region. But Sumerian was not forgotten. It moved upmarket, and kept its influence in the written language. Babylon and Assyria went on for a millennium and a half as the two powers within Mesopotamia, competing often with ruthless savagery, but speaking dialects of the same language.

阿卡德语在公元前一千年中期之前一直占据着中部地区，但其东部、北部和西部都被其他语言所包围。胡里安语（后来被“乌拉尔图语”取代，乌拉尔图语的名字至今仍与亚拉腊山有关）是北部的主要语言，其使用范围从今天的亚美尼亚一直延伸到南部的伊拉克基尔库克。（它的一些近亲语言，如东高加索语系的阿瓦尔语和列兹金语等，至今仍在里海西岸使用。）

While Akkadian held the central area until the middle of the first millennium BC, it was surrounded to the east, north and west by unrelated languages. Hurrian, replaced later by ‘Urartian’ (whose name lives on in Mount Ararat), was the major language of the north, spoken from modern Armenia as far south as Kirkuk in modern Iraq. (Its surviving relatives, tiny languages such as Avar and Lezgian in the East Caucasian family, are still spoken on the western shores of the Caspian.)

在其西侧，即如今的土耳其境内的安纳托利亚中部平原，居住着已知最早的印欧人——赫梯人，以及与其关系密切、讲卢维语和帕莱语的近亲。^*赫梯人公元前16至13世纪繁荣发展，创造了高度发达的文明。在距安卡拉以西150公里的博阿兹科伊（今土耳其境内）发现的赫梯皇家图书馆，不仅藏有赫梯语和阿卡德语文献，还有胡里安语、卢维语和帕莱语，其中还穿插着哈梯语、苏美尔语以及米坦尼贵族使用的印欧语系语言的词句。赫梯人经常对苏美尔和阿卡德构成威胁，正是由于赫梯人一次迅速的入侵，却未能持续推进，才使得巴比伦门户大开，最终落入前文提到的加喜特人之手。最终，赫梯帝国在十三世纪末崩溃，但与其相关的语言却延续了数个世纪，尤其是卢维语，以及更西边的吕底亚语。^†

To the west of this, in the central plain of Anatolia, which is now Turkey, we see the first known Indo-Europeans, Hittites, with their close relatives who spoke Luwian and Palaic.^* The Hittites, flourishing from the sixteenth to the thirteenth century BC, created a massively literate civilisation, and their royal library at Hattusas, discovered in modern Boğaz Köy, 150 kilometres west of Ankara, contains materials not only in Hittite and Akkadian, but also in Hurrian, Luwian and Palaic, interspersed here and there with phrases in Hattic, Sumerian and the Indo-Aryan language of the Mitannian aristocracy. The Hittites were often a threat to Sumer and Akkad, and it had been a swift Hittite invasion, not followed up, which had left Babylon open to the Kassite takeover already mentioned. In the event, the Hittite empire collapsed about the end of the thirteenth century, but related languages lived on for many centuries, particularly Luwian, and farther to the west Lydian.^†

在赫梯人以南，苏美尔和阿卡德正西方向，即今天的叙利亚境内，语言属于闪米特语系，与阿卡德语密切相关。我们已经看到，阿摩利人正是从这个方向入侵的（阿摩利人的名字来源于叙利亚北部的阿穆鲁地区，阿卡德语意为“西方”），大约在公元前2000年左右，这场入侵彻底终结了苏美尔人的独立，也终结了苏美尔语的口语化。

South of the Hittites but due west of Sumer and Akkad, in modern Syria, the languages were Semitic, close relatives of Akkadian. We have seen that it was from this direction that the Amorite invasion came (named after the region Amurru, Akkadian for ‘the west’, in northern Syria), which had delivered the coup de gršce to Sumerian independence, and hence Sumerian as a spoken language, around 2000 BC.

事实上，从乌加里特（位于拉塔基耶附近的沿海地区）经伊姆哈德（阿勒颇）、叙利亚北部的卡尔凯米什和卡特纳，一直到幼发拉底河畔的马里，这些使用闪米特语的城市之间似乎存在某种联系。马里和乌加里特都留下了公元前两千年的大型图书馆。但就这一时期的外来影响而言，这里的人们倾向于向南关注埃及的权力中心，而不是关注美索不达米亚的语言同胞。腓尼基港口城市古布拉（后来被希腊人称为比布鲁斯）通过出口木材，特别是黎巴嫩的雪松，向木材匮乏的埃及人大量出口，从而变得富裕起来。前面提到的阿摩利人城市都留下了大量从埃及进口的皇家花瓶、珠宝和雕像。再往南，在巴勒斯坦，整体财富水平和城市化程度较低，劫掠成性的哈比鲁人（埃及人称之为“阿皮鲁”）对较为定居的社区构成威胁。或许后来自称为“伊布里人” （希伯来人）的民族的祖先就属于他们之中。

There seems, in fact, to have been some fraternity among these cities of Semitic speech, from Ugarit (on the coast near Lataqieh) through Iamhad (Aleppo), Karkemish and Qatna in northern Syria to Mari on the Euphrates. Mari and Ugarit both left massive libraries from the second millennium BC. But as to foreign influence in this period, there was a tendency here to look south towards the power centre in Egypt, rather than to their linguistic cousins in Mesopotamia. The Phoenician port city of Gubla (known to the Greeks later as Byblos) was growing rich on exporting timber, specifically the cedars of Lebanon, to the wood-starved Egyptians. The Amorite cities just mentioned all left quantities of royal vases, jewels and statues imported from Egypt. Farther south, in Palestine, the general level of wealth and urbanisation was lower, and marauding Habiru (known to the Egyptians as ‘apiru) were a threat to more settled communities. Perhaps the ancestors of the nation later calling themselves ‘ibri (Hebrews) were among them.

公元前第二个千年，苏美尔和阿卡德地区已享有举足轻重的文化地位。楔形文字系统向周边所有地区传播，甚至包括独立发展出自身文字体系的埃兰，这便是其文化地位的显著体现。除了文字之外，阿卡德语在这一时期也是外交领域的通用语，即便巴比伦人和亚述人并未直接参与相关事务。

Throughout the second millennium BC, the land of Sumer and Akkad already enjoyed serious cultural prestige. This is clearly reflected in the spread of its cuneiform writing system to all its neighbours, including even Elam, which had independently developed its own alternative. Besides the script, its language, Akkadian, was in this period the lingua franca for diplomacy, even where the Babylonians or Assyrians were not a party to the matters under discussion.

但这种有利局面最终被外部事件打破：东部、北部和西部发生的一系列事件，对美索不达米亚及其语言产生了深远的影响。

But this favourable situation was ultimately upset by outside events: developments now occurred in the east, north and west which were to affect Mesopotamia, and its linguistic influence, profoundly.

公元前第二个千年末至第一个千年之初，一批又一批印欧人进入了安纳托利亚北部地区。他们可能来自巴尔干半岛，并将弗里吉亚语（后来是亚美尼亚语）带入了安纳托利亚中部和北部地区。公元前1115年，他们曾突破防线与亚述统治者提格拉特帕拉沙尔一世交战，因此被称为“穆什基人” 。 ^*除此之外，他们对美索不达米亚的影响甚微，因为美索不达米亚很大程度上受到安纳托利亚东部乌拉尔图王国的保护。

At the end of the second millennium BC and the beginning of the first, new companies of Indo-Europeans were entering the northerly territory of Anatolia. They would have come from the Balkans, bringing speakers of Phrygian, and later Armenian, into the central and northern areas. They are known as Muški on the one occasion (1115 BC) when they broke through to confront the Assyrian ruler Tiglath Pileser I,^* but otherwise they had little direct impact on Mesopotamia, largely shielded as it was by the buffer kingdom of the Urartians in the east of Anatolia.

大约在同一时期，东方也发生了另一场大规模的印欧语系民族入侵：波斯语或其直系祖先（与吠陀梵语密切相关）首次在伊朗高原地区出现。这种语言与在乌克兰平原和西伯利亚南部地区广泛分布了至少两千年的民族所使用的伊朗语系语言有亲缘关系，这些民族被称为斯基泰人或萨卡人。入侵伊朗的民族在与美索不达米亚接触数个世纪后才开始识字，因此他们早期到来的证据完全来自考古发现。在这些部落的名字中，有两个部落（根据阿卡德人的记载）似乎定居在苏美尔和阿卡德的边界附近：一个是北部的马代人，居住在阿格巴塔纳（今哈马丹）附近；另一个是南部的帕尔苏阿人，即“边境地带”（今法尔斯省）。这两个部落分别是米底人和波斯人，他们分别从北部和南部包围了埃兰地区。起初，他们似乎只是扎格罗斯山脉东部蛮族的轮替，是自古以来就居住在那里的库提人、卢卢比人和加喜特人的继承者；但从公元前七世纪开始，他们逐渐削弱并最终摧毁了美索不达米亚作为一个独立权力中心的地位。

In the east, at about the same time, there came another large-scale invasion by people with an Indo-European language: for the first time Persian, or its direct ancestor (closely related to Vedic Sanskrit), was spoken on the plateaux of Iran. This language was a cousin of the Iranian speech of the people who remained widespread on the plains of the Ukraine and southern Siberia for at least another two thousand years, under the names Scythian or Śaka. Those who invaded Iran would become literate only after some centuries of contact with Mesopotamia, so the early evidence for their arrival is purely archaeological. Among the names of the tribes were two which (from the Akkadian records) seemed to settle close to the borders with Sumer and Akkad, the Mādāi in the north round Agbatana (modern Hamadan), and those who inhabited the Parsūa or ‘borderlands’ in the south (modern Fars province): these were to be the Medes and Persians, and they now hemmed in the land of Elam respectively from the north and the south. At first, they seemed just to be a rotation of the barbarians in the Zagros mountains on the eastern flank, successor to the Quti, Lulubi and Kassites who had been there from time immemorial; but from the seventh century they were to undermine, and then destroy, Mesopotamia as an independent centre of power.

现在许多人认为，所有这些印欧语系语言的传播并非源于人口的大规模迁移，而是通过战争将新的精英阶层推向统治地位，新语言借助新社会秩序的威望在原有人口中传播开来。至于这些外来者为何能够强行进入，或许并非巧合，因为这恰好也是铁器使用普及的时代。

Many now believe that the spread of all these Indo-European languages was achieved without massive change of people, but through wars that put a new elite in control of the old lands, with new languages spreading in the old populations through the prestige of the new social order. As to why these interlopers were able to force an entry, presumably it is no coincidence that this was also the era in which the use of iron became established.

但对中东语言史而言，最重要的莫过于第三个族群——阿拉米人。他们是来自叙利亚北部的沙漠游牧民族，讲闪米特语。最早提及阿拉米人是在公元前12世纪末提格拉特帕拉沙尔一世的一篇铭文中，当时他们被描述为一个特别顽固的敌人。不久之后，我们得知大马士革是一座阿拉米人的城市。到了公元前10世纪，阿拉米人已经崛起为一股强大的势力，这主要是以赫梯-卢维人残余殖民地的衰落为代价的。随后，尽管遭到亚述君主的抵抗，他们仍然向东扩张。到了公元前9世纪末，苏美尔和阿卡德地区似乎到处都有阿拉米人的定居点。在这一时期，巴比伦王位的继承并非一成不变，至少有一个王朝——公元前10世纪初的比特巴兹王朝——似乎是阿拉米人建立的。迦勒底人（Kaldŭ）也是阿拉米人的一个部落，他们定居在苏美尔，并在公元前六至七世纪建立了巴比伦最后一个王朝，其中包括那布帕拉萨尔、尼布甲尼撒二世和那波尼德。阿拉米人已经深深融入了巴比伦的统治体系。

But most immediately significant for the linguistic history of the Middle East is a third group, the Aramaeans, desert nomads from northern Syria speaking a Semitic language. They are first heard of as a particularly persistent enemy in an inscription of the same Tiglath Pileser I at the end of the twelfth century BC. Soon after we hear that Damascus was an Aramaean city. By the tenth century they had established themselves as a significant power, largely at the expense of the remaining Hittite-Luwian colonies. Then they spread out towards the east, despite resistance from Assyrian monarchs, and by the end of the ninth century there were apparently settlements of them all over the land of Sumer and Akkad. The succession to the throne of Babylon was not routine in this period, and at least one dynasty, Bît Bazi in the early tenth century, appears to have been Aramaean. The Chaldaeans (Kaldŭ) were also an Aramaean tribe who settled in Sumer, and went on to found the last Babylonian dynasty in the seventh to sixth centuries, including Nabupolassar, Nebuchadrezzar II and Nabonidus. The Aramaeans had made themselves very much part of the establishment.

这或许可以部分解释为何从八世纪开始，阿拉米语逐渐取代阿卡德语，成为美索不达米亚的通用语言，并很快（随着亚述征服叙利亚和巴勒斯坦）确立了其在整个新月沃土的通用语地位。这并非文化主导的扩张，因为阿拉米人本身并没有形成任何独特的风格或文明；然而，正是他们将邻国腓尼基人发明的简单字母文字带入了古老帝国的中心地带。两千多年来，那里所有的文化和行政都建立在复杂的楔形文字之上。阿拉米人由此彻底改变了帝国的交流方式，或许也改变了其社会结构。如今，仅仅二十二个简单的符号就能完成过去需要六百多个符号才能完成的工作。

This must be part of the explanation for the way in which, beginning in the eighth century, their language came to replace Akkadian as the universal medium of Mesopotamia, and soon (as Assyria conquered Syria and Palestine) established itself as the lingua franca of the whole Fertile Crescent. This was not a culture-led expansion, since the Aramaeans are not associated with any distinctive style or civilisation of their own; nevertheless, they were the ones who brought simple alphabetic writing, the invention of their neighbours the Phoenicians, into the heart of the old empire, where for over two thousand years all culture and administration had been built on skill in the complicated cuneiform writing. They had thereby revolutionised its communications, and perhaps its social structure as well. Twenty-two simple signs could now do the work previously requiring over six hundred.

当亚洲发生这一切时，腓尼基人则沿着如今黎巴嫩的地中海沿岸，向着相反的方向扩张，或者更确切地说，是探索和开发。在语言上，腓尼基人（或称迦南人，这是他们自称的）与内陆和南方的邻居希伯来人非常相似；但他们对自己的家园却有着截然不同的态度。

While this was going on in Asia, the Phoenicians themselves, strung out along the Mediterranean coast of what is now Lebanon, were expanding, or rather exploring and exploiting, in the opposite direction. In language, the Phoenicians (or Canaanites, as they called themselves) were very similar to their neighbours inland and to the south, the Hebrews; but they had a very different attitude to their homeland.

“腓尼基”一词既是语言上的统称，更是经济上的统称，指代黎巴嫩沿海的贸易城市。^*虽然没有任何记录表明存在一个将它们联系起来的政治实体，甚至连联盟都算不上，但从公元前二千纪中期开始，这十几个独立的城市（其中最著名的是比布鲁斯、西顿和推罗）逐渐确立了自身作为主要供应中心的地位，这些城市从塞浦路斯进口铜和锡，从黎巴嫩进口木材，并供应奢侈品，尤其是服装和珠宝。由于它们的供应商或客户（尤其是埃及，因为木材来自埃及）往往居住在海外，这促进了船舶和航海技术的发展。凭借这些技术，这些城市在中东地区独一无二地拥有了远航的探索能力。最初的远征可能更早（古代史学家认为是在十二世纪末），但到了八世纪，腓尼基人的定居点网络已经遍布地中海，尤其集中在西西里岛、撒丁岛、非洲西北海岸和加的斯（腓尼基语“ gader”，意为“堡垒”）。这些定居点大多是贸易站，尤其是采矿点，而非城市。但有一个定居点却远不止于商业活动。它就是迦太基，位于今突尼斯的一个天然良港，很快便发展出庞大的帝国，其疆域涵盖北非、西西里岛和撒丁岛，并建立起自己的贸易网络。

’Phoenicia’ is a linguistic, and even more an economic, expression for the trading cities of coastal Lebanon.^* There is no record of a political unit linking them even as a league, but from the middle of the second millennium BC this line of a dozen or so independent cities (Byblos, Sidon and Tyre the most famous among them) had established themselves as the preferred centres for the supply of copper and tin from Cyprus, timber from Lebanon and luxury goods, especially clothing and jewellery. Since either their suppliers or their customers (especially Egypt, for the timber) often lived overseas, this fostered the development of ships and the know-how for navigation. With these, uniquely in the Middle East, the cities had the wherewithal for exploration much farther afield. The original expeditions may have been earlier (ancient historians suggest the end of the twelfth century), but it is clear that by the eighth century there was a network of Phoenician settlements from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, with particular concentration on Sicily, Sardinia, the north-western shores of Africa and Cadiz (Phoenician gader, ‘the fortress’). Mostly they were trading posts, and above all mining outlets, rather than cities, but in one case the settlement became much more than a commercial venture. This was Carthage, situated on a natural harbour in modern Tunisia, and soon developing not just a trade network but an empire of its own, in North Africa, Sicily and Sardinia.

腓尼基人的存在，使他们的定居点广泛传播了近东文明社会的风貌，并开辟了金属的长途出口贸易。腓尼基人是美索不达米亚文化的全球传播者。更具体地说，他们将字母文字系统传播给了希腊人和伊比利亚人，或许也传播给了伊特鲁里亚人和罗马人；因此，他们可以说是欧洲早期教育的奠基人。

By their presence, the Phoenician settlements will have spread far and wide a sense of what the cultivated and literate society of the Near East was like, as well as opening up a long-distance export trade in metals. The Phoenicians were the globalisers of Mesopotamian culture. Most concretely, they spread knowledge of their alphabetic writing system to the Greeks and Iberians, and just possibly also to the Etruscans and Romans; so they can claim to have given Europe its primary education.

在公元前第一个千年的大部分时间里，腓尼基语在地中海沿岸地区，尤其是在岛屿和南缘地区，都能听到。然而，从语言学的角度来看，它对欧洲的长期影响却微乎其微。希腊人和其他民族虽然明确地接受了腓尼基人的文字系统作为自身文字的基础（他们使用了“phoinik$ēAia grámmata ”一词），但却没有接受腓尼基语的任何元素。这或许部分反映了腓尼基人始终将自己视为外来者，认为他们来到这里只是为了经商，因此实际上并没有将自身的文化传递给他们的新客户或合作伙伴^。

Phoenician could be heard all round the Mediterranean, especially in its islands and on its southern rim, for most of the first millennium BC. Yet linguistically it had very little long-term impact on Europe. The Greeks and others accepted, quite explicitly, the Phoenicians’ writing system as the basis of their own (using the term phoinik$ēAia grámmata), but not a single element of their language. This is partly perhaps a comment on how little of their culture the Phoenicians, always thinking of themselves as outsiders, only there on business, were in fact passing on to their new customers or partners.^*

但更进一步来说，这表明字母表比表意文字系统抽象得多。正确理解字母表，就能让你清晰地书写自己的语言，而无需背负其他包袱。相比之下，苏美尔楔形文字的引入却产生了连锁反应。两千年后，巴比伦的抄写员仍然使用苏美尔语的片段作为阿卡德语对应词汇的简写符号，而且他们至今仍未找到表达阿卡德语所有音素的方法，尤其是在阿卡德语的发音超出苏美尔语的范畴时。这并非阿卡德语抄写员的特有缺陷：在其他使用楔形文字书写的语言中，例如赫梯语和乌拉尔图语，也存在类似的问题。^†

But further, it shows how much more abstract a tool an alphabet is than an ideographic writing system. With an alphabet, properly understood, you get a means of cleanly writing your own language, without further baggage. Contrast this with the knock-on effects when ideas of Sumerian cuneiform had been taken up. Two thousand years later, Babylonian scribes were still using bits of Sumerian as shorthand symbols for equivalent words in Akkadian, and indeed had still not worked out a way to express all the Akkadian sounds when they went beyond those in Sumerian. Nor was this a particular weakness on the part of Akkadian scribes: similar effects can be seen in other languages written in cuneiform, such as Hittite and Urartian.^†

因此，矛盾的是，腓尼基语在欧洲的语言影响甚微，尽管其使用者对他们接触到的语言产生了极其深远的影响。但迦太基人所说的布匿语（即腓尼基语）却在北非扎根。显然，它在公元前146年迦太基城邦覆灭后，甚至在随后的五百年间，在以拉丁语为官方语言的罗马政权统治下，依然延续了下来。因为公元五世纪，希波的奥古斯丁仍在引用这种语言的词汇，并提及它在努米底亚乡村教区的一位牧师身上的实用性。^然而，令人扼腕叹息的是，这种曾经广泛使用、并将字母文字传播到欧洲的语言，却无法保证任何一本古代书籍的流传至今。

Paradoxically, then, Phoenician had little linguistic impact in Europe, even though the effect its speakers had on the languages they contacted was truly momentous. But Punic, as the same language is known when spoken by Carthaginians, did get established in North Africa. It evidently long survived the downfall of Carthage as a state in 146 BC, some 655 years after its foundation, and even the Latin-speaking Roman administration that followed for another five hundred years, since Augustine of Hippo is still quoting words of the language in the fifth century AD, remarking on its utility for a priest in a country parish in Numidia.⁶ But tantalisingly and heartbreakingly, this language, once so widely used and the vehicle that had spread alphabetic literacy to Europe, could not ensure the survival of a single book from antiquity.

回到西亚，从公元前七世纪中叶开始，变革的步伐似乎加快了。在公元前627年的四十年间，亚述的势力扩张到了顶峰，北至吕底亚，西至腓尼基，南至埃及尼罗河三角洲，东至埃兰。然而仅仅十五年后，它便崩溃了。巴比伦的迦勒底人推翻了亚述，并联合米底人，从自身的角度重建了帝国。这是美索不达米亚帝国在巴比伦最后一位伟大的皇帝尼布甲尼撒二世统治下的最后辉煌。他于公元前562年去世。二十五年前，就在他征服耶路撒冷并将犹太人驱逐出境的同时，其他人也开始了政治整合的进程，这将抹去巴比伦的辉煌。米底人在公元前580年代击败了乌拉尔图人，从而控制了北部的大部分地区；公元前550年，他们自己却在西南邻国波斯新王居鲁士的领导下发动政变而覆灭。居鲁士随后吞并了吕底亚（从而攫取了安纳托利亚的其余部分），接着又征服了伊朗东部，远至今天的塔吉克斯坦、阿富汗和俾路支斯坦。最终，他转而攻打巴比伦帝国，几乎兵不血刃地将其征服。他的儿子冈比西斯甚至征服了埃及，尽管他不久后便去世了。到公元前522年，从安纳托利亚和埃及到今天突厥斯坦和印度河流域的边界，所有土地都由一个统一的统治者掌控。如果这是美索不达米亚典型的成就，那么不出几代人，这个帝国就会崩溃；但波斯人采取了不同的策略，他们建立的统一帝国延续了两百年之久。

Back in western Asia, from the mid-seventh century the pace of change seemed to accelerate. In four decades to 627 BC Assyria expanded its power to its maximum, taking in Lydia in the north, Phoenicia in the west, the Nile delta of Egypt in the south, and Elam in the east. But just fifteen years later it collapsed. The Chaldaeans in Babylon had overthrown the Assyrians, enlisting the Medes to help them, and proceeded to rebuild their empire from their own perspective. This was the final incandescence of Mesopotamian power, under the last great emperor of Babylon, Nebuchadrezzar II. He died in 562 BC. Twenty-five years earlier, even as he had been conquering Jerusalem, and deporting its Jews, others were beginning a process of political consolidation that would erase the greatness of Babylon. The Medes defeated the Urartians in the 580s and so established control of most of the north; but in 550 BC they themselves succumbed to a royal putsch executed by their southwestern neighbour Persia, under its new king Cyrus. Cyrus went on to absorb first Lydia (thus grabbing the rest of Anatolia), then the eastern extremities of Iran, as far as modern Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Baluchistan. Finally he turned on the Babylonian empire itself, and took it with hardly a battle. His son Cambyses even conquered Egypt, though he died soon after. By 522 BC, there was a single overlord of all the land from Anatolia and Egypt to the borders of modern Turkestan and the Indus valley. If this had been a typical Mesopotamian achievement, a collapse would have been expected within a generation; but Persians used different methods, and the unitary empire they had created was to last for two hundred years.

这位统治者名叫大流士，他的行政才能堪比居鲁士，既能赢得胜利，又能牢牢掌控被征服者的忠诚。最引人注目的是，他下令帝国的官方语言并非波斯语或吕底亚语，而是阿拉姆语。此举使得这种闪米特语的使用范围迅速扩展，超越了以往的疆界——西至爱琴海沿岸、巴尔干半岛和埃及，东至兴都库什山脉和印度河两岸。

The overlord’s name was Darius, and he had administrative talents comparable to Cyrus’s genius for winning victories and retaining the loyalty of those conquered. Most interestingly from our point of view, he decreed that the administrative language of the empire should be not Persian or Lydian, but Aramaic. The result was the effective spread of the use of this Semitic language beyond all previous bounds—across to the coast of the Aegean, the Balkans and Egypt in the west, and out to the Hindu Kush and the banks of the Indus in the east.

这项决定想必是出于纯粹的实用主义考量，因为阿拉姆语并非波斯王室——阿契美尼德王朝——实际使用的语言。或许为了解决这个问题，同一王朝首次着手将波斯语发展成为一种文学语言，并设计了一种音节文字（基于楔形文字符号）来书写波斯语，并将其与埃兰语和阿卡德语一起用于纪念碑铭文。（阿拉姆字母同样可以用来书写波斯语，但显然被认为过于随意，不适合用于皇家纪念碑。）然而，这种文字并未流行起来，早在公元前338年，也就是波斯帝国被希腊征服之前，就已被弃用。尽管如此，口语却得以延续，并且蓬勃发展，因为它是现代波斯语及其相关方言的祖先，这些语言至今仍在伊朗使用。

This decision must have been purely pragmatic, for Aramaic was not the language that Persian royalty, the Achaemenid clan, actually spoke. Perhaps to remedy this problem, the same reign undertook to make Persian too a literary language for the first time, devising a syllabary with which to write it (based on cuneiform symbols) and using it, together with Elamite and Akkadian, on monumental inscriptions. (The Aramaic alphabet, which could just as easily have been used to write Persian, was evidently seen as too informal for imperial monuments.) But the script did not catch on, and had been abandoned by 338 BC, even before the fall of the Persian empire to the Greeks. Nonetheless, the spoken language lived on, and indeed flourished, since it is the ancestor of the modern Persian language and related dialects, spoken in Iran up to the present day.

虽然阿拉姆语没有作为西亚的语言流传下来，但大流士统一行政语言的做法，在波斯统治的接下来两百年间基本得以实现，产生了许多重要的后果。

Although Aramaic did not live on as the language of western Asia, the unification of administrative language by Darius, essentially realised during the next two hundred years of Persian administration, had a number of important consequences.

它使人们熟悉了用通用语（而非地方语言）进行行政管理的方式。因此，在帝国被亚历山大及其继任者征服之后，希腊语得以迅速传播，其目的也与此相同。在接下来的两百年里，希腊语通过为阿拉姆语而设的渠道传播。（参见第六章“亚洲诸王：希腊语通过战争传播”，第243页。）

It created a familiarity with administration conducted in a lingua franca, separate from the vernacular languages. So the structures were in place to allow the rapid spread of Greek, for the same purposes, after the fall of the empire to Alexander and his successors. Greek flowed through channels made for Aramaic for the next two hundred years. (See Chapter 6, ‘Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war’, p. 243.)

这种表面上的语言统一性在帝国的各个地区产生了不同的长期结果。在安纳托利亚，希腊语在其传播的两个世纪里似乎比阿拉姆语走得更远：它取代了所有剩余的本土语言。（这些语言主要是吕底亚语及其较小的近亲，但也包括弗里吉亚语，即迈达斯国王的语言。）在现代伊朗和阿富汗地区，与波斯语相关的伊朗语系语言广泛使用，希腊语取代阿拉姆语成为通用语，但并未影响当地的方言。当然，新建立的希腊殖民地，无论多么偏远，都是例外。在美索^不达米亚、叙利亚、巴勒斯坦和埃及，希腊语在普通民众中几乎没有取代阿拉姆语；但某些地方群体，例如长途商人，以及令人惊讶的是居住在埃及亚历山大的犹太人，似乎接受了希腊语。

This superficial linguistic unity gave different long-term results in the various parts of the empire. In Anatolia, Greek seems to have gone deeper in its two centuries than Aramaic had: it replaced all the remaining indigenous languages. (These had largely been Lydian and its smaller relatives, but also Phrygian, the language of King Midas.) In the area of modern Iran and Afghanistan, where Iranian languages related to Persian were widely spoken, it supplanted Aramaic as lingua franca, but did not touch the vernaculars. The newly founded Greek colonies, however far flung, were of course exceptions to this.⁷ In Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, Greek made little headway with the general public against Aramaic; but certain local groups, such as long-distance merchants, and surprisingly the Jews resident in Alexandria in Egypt, seem to have taken it up.

公元前二世纪中叶，罗马人在西方的崛起和帕提亚人在东方的入侵，意味着希腊语面临挑战。希腊语的应对方式各不相同。它对拉丁语产生了法律和军事用途，但除此之外几乎没有其他用途，因此叙利亚、巴勒斯坦和埃及等地出现了三种或更多种语言并存的局面。然而，在帕提亚语出现之前（帕提亚语与波斯语关系密切，其使用者也信奉琐罗亚斯德教的经典《阿维斯塔》），希腊语实际上已被淘汰，而阿拉姆语则至少作为一种书面语言有所复兴。此后，除一种之外，几乎所有用于伊朗语系语言的书写系统，包括西方的帕提亚语和波斯语（巴列维语），东方的花剌子模语、粟特语以及斯基泰语系的沙卡语和奥塞梯语，以及《阿维斯塔》经典本身，都受到了阿拉姆语的影响^。

The advent of the Romans in the west, and the Parthians in the east, in the middle of the second century BC, meant that Greek was challenged. It responded in different ways. To Latin, it yielded legal and military uses, but very little else, so that Syria, Palestine and Egypt found themselves now areas where three languages or more were in contention. But before Parthian, which was a close relative of Persian (and whose speakers shared allegiance to the Zoroastrian scriptures, the Avesta), Greek was effectively eliminated, while Aramaic had something of a resurgence at least as a written language. Its use went on to inspire all but one of the writing systems henceforth used for the Iranian languages, Parthian and Persian (Pahlavi) in the west, Khwarezmian, Sogdian and the Scythian languages Śaka and Ossetic in the east, as well as for the Avesta scriptures themselves.^*

到那时，阿拉姆语在任何地方都不再是官方语言，仅在肥沃新月地带是多数族群使用的语言。尽管如此，它在这一广袤的区域内仍然是主要语言，持续了近千年之久，直到公元7世纪，一种全新的语言才将其取代。

Aramaic was by now an official language nowhere, and a majority-community language only in the Fertile Crescent. Nevertheless, it remained the predominant language over this large area for almost a thousand years until the seventh century AD, when a completely new language overwhelmed it.

这就是阿拉伯语，它是由先知穆罕默德的早期皈依者们，怀着伊斯兰教的灵感和虔诚的意志传入的。这种几乎无人知晓的语言，在短短两代人的时间内，便遍及整个近东地区，直至伊朗边境，以及整个北非地区，直至赫拉克勒斯之柱，这堪称历史上最令人瞩目的事件之一。然而，它的传播并非一帆风顺：下文我们将更详细地描述这一过程，届时，我们将探讨那些阻碍其传播的语言障碍。

This was Arabic, brought with Islamic inspiration and a fervent will by the early converts of the prophet Muhammad. The progress of this virtually unknown language over two generations, so as to cover the whole Near East to the borders of Iran, and the whole of North Africa to the Pillars of Hercules, is one of the most striking events in history. But its progress was not totally irresistible: and it will be interesting, when we describe it in greater detail below, to ponder the linguistic obstacles that proved unyielding.

至此，我们对西亚语言跨越式发展的快速回顾就结束了。西亚语言区最终扩展到北非大部分地区。现在我们可以放慢脚步，更仔细地考察一些具体的语言：许多语言都是世界已知语言史上的独特先驱。

This ends our exhaustingly rapid review of language leapfrog in West Asia, a linguistic zone which ultimately expanded to take in most of North Africa. We can now slow down a little, and look more closely at some of the individual languages: many were unique pioneers in the known language history of the world.

苏美尔语——第一种古典语言：死后的生活

Sumerian—the first classical language: Life after death

恩基神父回答宁舒布尔：

Father Enki answers Ninshubur:

“我女儿到底怎么了！我非常担心。”

’What has happened to my daughter! I am troubled,

伊南娜发生了什么事！我很担心。

What has happened to Inanna! I am troubled,

女王究竟发生了什么事？我感到忧虑。

What has happened to the queen of all the lands! I am troubled,

天庭的圣典究竟发生了什么事？我感到忧虑。

What has happened to the hierodule of heaven! I am troubled.’

他从指甲缝里取出泥土，捏成了库尔加鲁。

From his fingernail he brought forth dirt, fashioned the kurgarru,

他从另一根指甲里取出泥土，捏成了卡拉图鲁。

From his other fingernail he brought forth dirt, fashioned the kalaturru.

他给了库尔加鲁生命之粮。

To the kurgarru he gave the food of life.

他赐予卡拉图鲁生命之水。

To the kalaturru he gave the water of life.

恩基神父对卡拉图鲁和库尔加鲁说： ……

Father Enki says to the kalaturru and kurgarru: …

将六十倍的生命之粮，六十倍的生命之水洒在上面，

’Sixty times the food of life, sixty times the water of life, sprinkle upon it,

伊南娜必将复活^。8

Surely Inanna will arise.’⁸

苏美尔人比任何人都更了解语言的生命和名望转瞬即逝的诱惑。在古亚述首都尼尼微的皇家图书馆于1845年被发掘之前，关于这种语言的所有知识已经失传了近两千年。人们发现，最早的文献是用一种比阿卡德语更古老的语言写成的，而且与阿卡德语截然不同。以至于公元前七世纪的亚述人不得不借助全套双语词典、语法书和平行文本来研究它。无论是希腊语还是圣经中关于美索不达米亚的记载，都无法让新来的研究者预料到这个文明的语言基础竟如此陌生；毕竟，大多数文献都是用一种与希伯来语和阿拉姆语非常相似的语言写成的，这让人感到安心。无论尼尼微和巴比伦辉煌岁月中留下了什么，它们成就的语言基础都已彻底消失。

Sumerian knows better than any the tantalising evanescence of life and fame for a language. All knowledge of this language had been lost for almost two thousand years when the royal library of the ancient Assyrian capital, Nineveh, was excavated in 1845, and it turned out that the earliest documents were written in a language older than Akkadian, and so different from it that the Assyrians of the seventh century BC had approached it armed with a student’s panoply of bilingual dictionaries, grammars and parallel texts. Nothing in the Greek or biblical record of Mesopotamia had prepared the new researchers to expect such an alien foundation for this civilisation; the majority of the documents after all were written in a language reassuringly similar to Hebrew and Aramaic. Whatever had survived down the ages of the greatness of Nineveh and Babylon, the linguistic basis of their achievements had been totally effaced.

苏美尔语，即美索不达米亚最南端苏美尔人的原始语言，实际上在辛那赫里布图书馆的那些文献被撰写之时，已经消亡了1300年之久。然而，理解阿卡德语楔形文字的唯一途径，是将其视为对一套专为苏美尔人设计的符号系统的重新诠释。早期苏美尔文字的复杂性，以及可能存在的威望，使得任何想要将其作为自身语言的外来者，都不得不将苏美尔语本身也一并纳入其中。

Sumerian, the original speech of Šumer, as they called the southernmost part of Mesopotamia, had in fact already been dead for another 1300 years when those documents from Sennacherib’s library were written. But it turned out that the only way to understand Akkadian cuneiform writing was to see it as an attempt to reinterpret a sign system that had been designed for Sumerian use. The intricacy, and probably the prestige, of the early Sumerian writing had been such that any outsiders who wanted to adopt it for their own language had largely had to take the Sumerian language with it.

如果符号含义明确，这倒不是什么大问题：代表苏美尔语词汇的符号只需赋予新的发音，并按照阿卡德语中对应的词汇来读。但阿卡德语与苏美尔语截然不同，无论在语音还是词汇结构上都大相径庭。由于没有为阿卡德语引入新的符号，这些差异基本上只能被忽略：实际上，阿卡德语使用者只能按照带有浓重苏美尔口音的人的发音来书写阿卡德语。那些原本按音标读的苏美尔语符号仍然按照苏美尔语的读法来读，只是组合起来近似于阿卡德语词汇；而对于阿卡德语中苏美尔语没有使用的发音，他们就只能用最接近的发音来代替。

This was not too big a problem in cases where signs had a clear meaning: signs that stood for Sumerian words were just given new pronunciations, and read as the corresponding words in Akkadian. But Akkadian was a very different language from Sumerian, both in phonetics and in the structure of its words. Since no new signs were introduced for Akkadian, these differences largely had to be ignored: in effect, Akkadian speakers resigned themselves to writing their Akkadian as it might be produced by someone with a heavy Sumerian accent. Sumerian signs that were read phonetically went on being read as they were in Sumerian, but put together to approximate Akkadian words; and where Akkadian had sounds that were not used in Sumerian, they simply made do with whatever was closest.

因此，苏美尔语至少以两种方式在消亡后以另一种形式延续了下来。它作为一种古典语言得以传承，其伟大的文学作品被奉为经典，并被后世每一代楔形文字抄写员引用。但它也作为一种强加的限制而存在，制约着阿卡德语的表达，事实上，也制约着之后任何试图使用完整楔形文字系统的语言，例如在接下来的两千年里，埃兰语、胡里安语、卢维语、赫梯语和乌拉尔图语都采用了这种书写方式。这仿佛意味着现代西欧语言注定要尽可能地模仿拉丁语的拼写，并辅以少量的语音注释，以说明如何发音才能使这些沿袭已久的罗马拼写在荷兰语、爱尔兰语、法语或英语中表达出有意义的意思^。

So Sumerian survived its death as a living language in at least two ways. It lived on as a classical language, its great literary works canonised and quoted by every succeeding generation of cuneiform scribes. But it also lived on as an imposed constraint on the expression of Akkadian, and indeed any subsequent language that aspired to use the full cuneiform system of writing, as Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, Hittite and Urartian were to do, over the next two millennia. It is as if modern western European languages were condemned to be written as closely as possible to Latin, with a smattering of phonetic annotations to show how the time-honoured Roman spellings should be pronounced to give a meaningful utterance in Dutch, Irish, French or English.^*

苏美尔语的起源尚不明确；只有一些格鲁吉亚人声称他们的语言与^苏美尔语有关，但这种说法并未被广泛接受。无论其先前的历史如何，显然从公元前四千年起，美索不达米亚南部就存在着一系列活跃的社群，他们吸收了当时农业制度化带来的收益，并建立了最早的城市。这些城市似乎首先是集体所有制，每个集体都以一位主神的名义持有所有财产，而实际的管理权则掌握在祭司手中。陶轮、旋耕犁和帆都开始被使用，人们也开始加工金、银和青铜。由于象形文字及其发展为楔形文字的过程都发生在这一时期，这为我们提供了世界语言发展史的第一个直接证据。商业用途似乎先于文字出现：在黏土上印制符号最初是为了方便地替代用于库存和合同的黏土代币^。

The origin of Sumerian is obscure; only some Georgians claim that their language is related,⁹ but the claim has not been widely accepted. Whatever their previous history, there was evidently a lively set of communities active in southern Mesopotamia from the fourth millennium BC, absorbing the gains from the then recent institutionalisation of agriculture, and establishing the first cities, which seem first of all to have been collectives each holding all their goods in the name of a presiding deity, with effective managerial power in the hands of the priesthood. The potter’s wheel, the swing-plough and the sail all came into use, and a beginning was made in working gold, silver and bronze. Since pictograms, and their development into cuneiform writing, were invented in this period, this gives us our first direct testimony of the language history of the world. It seems that commercial uses came first: impressions of symbols on clay began as convenient substitutes for sets of clay tokens, used for inventories and contracts.¹⁰

公元前三千年苏美尔城邦前所未有的财富和文化辉煌很快引起了北方的关注，最终导致阿卡德国王的敌对入侵和政治巩固。公元前24世纪萨尔贡的入侵以及随后五代阿卡德人的统治，必然导致苏美尔语和阿卡德语之间更频繁的接触。苏美尔语-阿卡德语双语在精英阶层中变得普遍，这一点在最高层也有所体现：萨尔贡的女儿恩赫杜安娜据称创作了两套苏美尔赞美诗，其中最著名的（献给伊南娜的）已发现约五十份抄本。 ¹¹

The unprecedented riches and cultural brilliance of the city-states in third-millennium Sumer had soon attracted unwelcome attention from the north, resulting in a hostile takeover and political consolidation under the king of Akkad. The result of Sargon’s invasion in the twenty-fourth century, and the five generations of Akkadian dominance that followed, must have been much greater contact between the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. Sumerian-Akkadian bilingualism would have become common in the elite, and one can see evidence of this at the highest level, since Sargon’s daughter Enheduanna is supposed to have composed two cycles of Sumerian hymns, and the most famous (to Inanna) has been found in some fifty copies.¹¹

在苏美尔文学创作中，女性，尤其是公主和女祭司的参与并不罕见。她们创作葬礼赞歌、书信，尤其是情歌。

This participation by women, especially princesses and priestesses, in Sumerian literature was not uncommon. They wrote funeral hymns, letters and especially love songs.

我的主舒辛啊，你的城市举起手来如同一个跛子，

Thy city lifts its hand like a cripple, O my lord Shu-Sin,

它像一头幼狮一样匍匐在你的脚下，舒尔吉之子啊。

It lies at thy feet like a lion-cub, O son of Shulgi.

我的天哪，侍酒女有甜酒要赐！

O my god, the wine-maid has sweet wine to give,

就像她那蜜饯般的酒一样甜美，她的阴户也甜美如酒…… ¹²

Like her date-wine sweet is her vulva, sweet is her wine …¹²

偶尔也会播放摇篮曲。

There is also the occasional lullaby.

usa ŋanu usa ŋanu

usa ŋanu ki dumuŋaše

usa kulu ki dumuŋaše

igi badbadani u kunib

igi gunani šuzu ŋarbi

u eme za malilikani

za mallilil u nagule…

来睡觉吧，来睡觉吧

Come sleep, come sleep,

到我儿子身边来，

Come to my son,

快点睡吧，我的儿子。

Hurry sleep to my son,

安抚他躁动不安的双眼，

Put to sleep his restless eyes,

把你的手放在他闪亮的眼睛上，

Put your hand on his sparkling eyes,

至于他那喋喋不休的舌头

And as for his babbling tongue

不要让喋喋不休影响他的睡眠。

Let not the babbling hold back his sleep.

他会用小麦填满你的膝盖。

He will fill your lap with wheat.

我会为你做些甜甜的小奶酪，

I will make sweet for you the little cheeses,

那些小小的奶酪，是人类的治愈良药……

Those little cheeses that are the healer of man…

我的花园里种着浇水充足的生菜……

My garden is lettuce well-watered…

愿妻子成为你的依靠。

May the wife be your support,

愿你儿女双全。

May the son be your lot,

愿扬谷的大麦成为你的新娘，

May the winnowed barley be your bride,

愿丰饶女神阿什南与你结盟。

May Ashnan the goddess of fruitfulness be your ally,

愿你拥有一位能言善辩的守护天使。

May you have an eloquent guardian angel,

愿您拥有幸福美满的一天…… ¹³

May you achieve a reign of happy days …¹³

这些作品通常用埃梅萨尔语（Emesal ，意为“优美的语言”）写成，这是一种独立的苏美尔语方言，在抄写员的词典中有详细记载。在对话作品中，这种方言用于女神的言辞。它与标准苏美尔语埃梅吉尔语（Emegir ，意为“王子的语言”）在词汇（包括许多神祇的名字）和发音（辅音的发音位置通常更靠前）上都有所不同；但在语法上则完全一样。例如，当女神伊南娜假装拒绝一位纠缠不休的求婚者的追求时，她会这样喊道：

These works are usually written in Emesal, ‘the fine tongue’, a separate dialect of Sumerian, well documented in scribal dictionaries. In dialogue works this dialect is used for the speech of goddesses. It differs from standard Sumerian, Emegir, ‘the princely tongue’, both in vocabulary (including the names of many gods) and also in pronunciation (consonants by and large being articulated farther forward in the mouth); it differs not at all in its grammar. For example, when the goddess Inanna is affecting to repel the advances of an importunate suitor, she cries:

kuli Mulila šu bamu emeše daŋen

amaŋu lulaše ta munaben

amaŋu Gašangale lulaše ta munaben

恩利尔的朋友，放了我吧！让我回家！

Friend of Enlil, let me free! Let me go to my house!

我该对母亲撒什么谎？

What lie shall I tell my mother?

我该对我的母亲宁伽尔说谎什么呢？

What lie shall I tell my mother Ningal?

恩利尔和宁伽尔当然都是神。在埃梅吉尔，情况大概是这样的（差异已标出）：

Both Enlil and Ningal are, of course, gods. In Emegir this would have been (with the differences highlighted):

kuli Enlila šu bamu eŋuše gaŋen

amaŋu lulaše ana munaben

amaŋu Ningale lulaše ana munaben ¹⁴

amaŋu Ningale lulaše ana munaben¹⁴

由此看来，苏美尔语似乎也像世界许多其他语言一样，存在一种专门用于女性说话的方言。苏美尔语的独特之处在于，这种方言获得了特殊的、明确的地位，并被记录在语法书中：这可以被视为苏美尔文学中女性地位崇高的又一佐证。

So it seems that Sumerian, like many other languages all over the world, had a special dialect for women’s speech. What marks out Sumerian is that this had gained a special, explicit, status, recorded in the grammar books: this could be taken as further evidence of the high status of women in Sumerian literature.

回到苏美尔语-阿卡德语双语现象的问题，专家们一致认为，公元前2400年至公元前1600年间，苏美尔地区的语言使用比例从完全使用苏美尔语转变为完全使用阿卡德语。这一时期初期，苏美尔由众多独立的城邦组成；公元前23世纪，苏美尔先后被阿卡德人统治；公元前19世纪，又先后被阿摩利人和（短暂的）埃兰人统治；公元前18世纪，苏美尔又被汉谟拉比统治。在第一个巴比伦帝国瓦解后，苏美尔恢复了独立，或者更确切地说，陷入了无政府状态，但此时街头巷尾和人们的日常用语已全部变为阿卡德语。

Returning to the question of Sumerian-Akkadian bilingualism, specialists agree that the balance of language spoken in Sumer shifted over the period 2400-1600 BC from total Sumerian to total Akkadian. Sumer began this period as a collection of independent city-states, suffered Akkadian domination in the twenty-third century, Amorite and (briefly) Elamite domination in the nineteenth, and the Babylonian rule of Hammurabi in the eighteenth. It ended with a restored independence, or rather anarchy, after the breakdown of this first Babylonian empire, but the language on the streets and in the homes was now Akkadian.

这是一个有趣的双语不稳定现象的例子，因为在许多方面，这种情况让人想起罗马帝国时期希腊语和拉丁语之间的关系：一种主导文化生活，另一种主导政治生活。在罗马帝国时期，尽管政治动荡，希腊人的声誉也褒贬不一，与罗马人高高在上的政治威望和稳固地位形成鲜明对比，但希腊语在任何地方都没有被拉丁语取代。然而，在美索不达米亚，尽管各个闪米特民族在政治上占据主导地位，却也造成了社会动荡；苏美尔人口似乎没有大规模迁徙；苏美尔文化的威望也未受到挑战，苏美尔语却逐渐衰落。

It was an interesting example of unstable bilingualism, since in many ways the situation is reminiscent of the relation between Greek and Latin in the Roman empire, one dominating cultural and the other political life. In that case, despite the political instability, and the generally shifty reputation of the Greeks, contrasting with the towering political prestige and steadiness of the Romans, Greek nowhere lost ground to Latin. Yet here in Mesopotamia, where the various Semitic peoples, for all their political dominance, were sources of disruption, where there was apparently no major movement of the Sumerian population, and where Sumerian culture’s prestige was unchallenged, Sumerian steadily lost ground.

在某些情况下，甚至闪米特统治者也试图为苏美尔文化进行顽强抵抗。公元前20至19世纪，伊辛王国控制着苏美尔最重要的三座城市：尼普尔、乌鲁克和埃利都。该王国的统治王朝源自美索不达米亚北部阿卡德语区的马里，但其国王自称为“乌尔之王、苏美尔和阿卡德之王”，所有官方铭文均使用苏美尔语，并且苏美尔文学经典的新版本也大量出版发行。

In some cases even Semitic rulers attempted to fight a rearguard action on behalf of Sumerian culture. In the kingdom of Isin, which held the three most important Sumerian cities of Nippur, Uruk and Eridu in the twentieth to nineteenth centuries BC, the ruling dynasty stemmed from Mari, in the Akkadian-speaking north of Mesopotamia; yet its king termed himself ‘King of Ur, King of Sumer and Akkad’, all its official inscriptions were in Sumerian, and there was flourishing production of new editions of the classics of Sumerian literature.

苏美尔语未能与阿卡德语并存，成为一种鲜活语言，其原因之一可能是，那些具有影响力的外来者本身就讲一种闪米特语，因此他们觉得用阿卡德语交流更为便捷。只有阿卡德人自古以来就与苏美尔人生活在同一地区，或许因此练就了双语能力。其他人则可能对南方文化的复杂性感到不耐烦。不难想象，一个普通的阿摩利人四处迁徙时会说：“反正他们都说阿卡德语，不是吗？”整个新月沃土都使用某种闪米特语，这些语言本质上非常相似，在某种程度上可以相互理解。尽管苏美尔人拥有举足轻重的文化地位（而且这种地位显然从未降低），但他们最终还是不得不在日常生活和商业活动中在语言问题上做出妥协。

One factor working against the survival of Sumerian as a living language alongside Akkadian may have been the fact that the influential newcomers already spoke a Semitic language, and so found it easier just to get by in Akkadian. Only the Akkadians had lived in close proximity with Sumerian from time immemorial, and perhaps become bilingual. Others would be more impatient of the cultural complications they found down south. It is easy to imagine the average Amorite on the move saying: ‘After all, they all speak Akkadian, don’t they?’ The whole Fertile Crescent was familiar with some Semitic language or other, and by their nature they were all very similar, and to some extent mutually comprehensible. For all their cultural prestige (which clearly never diminished), the Sumerians found themselves having to compromise on language in their daily and business lives.

从某种意义上说，阿卡德语已经承担了苏美尔语使用者卸下的重担。学习阿卡德语的书写方式，一如既往地难以想象，只能将其视为苏美尔语的延伸。尽管苏美尔语和阿卡德语在语言上截然不同，它们的基本词汇完全不相关，语音系统也大相径庭。阿卡德语的语音系统始终无法始终如一地区分b和p、d、t和t，以及g、k和q。阿卡德语似乎缺乏许多闪米特语系语言所特有的语音细微差别，例如，其他闪米特语系语言可能有多达三个h音，而阿卡德语却只有一个；其他闪米特语系语言可能有多达四个s音，而阿卡德语却有三个。很难说这种现象仅仅是由于苏美尔语拼写的简陋造成的。

In a sense, though, Akkadian had already taken up the burden that the speakers of Sumerian were laying down. It remained unthinkable, as it always had been, to learn to write Akkadian in any way but as an extension of Sumerian, and this despite the fact that Sumerian and Akkadian were poles apart as languages, with all their basic vocabulary totally unrelated, and quite different sound systems. The system never provided the means to distinguish consistently between b and p, among d, t and t, or among g, k and q in Akkadian. Akkadian appears to be rather lacking in many of the phonetic subtleties that are characteristic of many of its Semitic sisters, having only one h sound where they may have up to three, three s sounds where they have up to four. It is difficult to tell whether it is just the poverty of Sumerian spelling which causes this appearance.

阿卡德语抄写员似乎唯一允许自己进行的创新是引入了一个新的喉塞音符号“”，以及对苏美尔语词符或表意符号的相当自由的使用：这些符号一直被用作双关语，能够象征与苏美尔语中对应词语相同的发音；现在它们也可以在阿卡德语中发挥同样的作用。例如，苏美尔语中表示“手”的符号现在可以读作阿卡德语中的idu，意为“手”；它还可以表示音节id、it、it、ed、et和et。

The only innovations that Akkadian scribes appear to have permitted themselves were a new sign for the glottal stop, ’, and considerable licence with the Sumerian word symbols or logograms: they had always been available as punning devices, able to symbolise the same sound as the word they signified in Sumerian; now they could do the same trick for Akkadian as well. So, for example, the Sumerian sign , meaning ‘hand’, could now be read as idu, ‘hand’, in Akkadian; it could also represent the syllables id, it, it, ed, et and et.

苏美尔语的文字符号和文学作品一直是阿卡德语书写的基础，即便阿卡德语作为国际通用语，已遍及新月沃土，并远远超出闪米特语族群的疆域。基于“埃杜巴”（edubba，即“泥板屋”）学校的同一教育体系至少延续了两千年，因为在公元前三千年的苏美尔城邦乌鲁克以及公元前七世纪中叶亚述首都尼尼微的亚述巴尼拔图书馆中，都发现了按相同顺序教授苏美尔语符号的符号表。掌握苏美尔文学经典（其文本体系在公元前二千年中期之后未再扩充）一直是学术成就的巅峰，也是学生后期学习的重点。即使在数学领域，尽管教科书是用阿卡德语编写的，但大部分术语仍然使用苏美尔语。看来苏美尔语在课堂上仍然被使用：这使得剩余的练习和教科书在发音方面不够明确，而我们原本希望如此。

Sumerian word symbols, and Sumerian literature, remained the basis of written Akkadian, even as the language swept all round the Fertile Crescent, and well beyond the domains of the Semitic-speaking peoples, as a lingua franca for international communication. The same educational system, based on the edubba ‘tablet-house’ schools, was maintained for at least two millennia, since sign lists to teach the symbols, in the same order, have been found in the Sumerian city of Uruk dating from the third millennium and Ashurbanipal’s library in the Assyrian capital Nineveh from the mid-seventh century BC. Mastery of the classics of Sumerian literature, a canon of texts which was not extended after the mid-second millennium, remained the pinnacle of scholarly achievement, and the focus of later years spent at school. Even in mathematics, most of the terminology was in Sumerian, though the textbooks were written in Akkadian. It appears that Sumerian went on being spoken in the classroom: this has made the remaining exercises and textbooks less explicit on pronunciation than we should have liked.

正是阿卡德文化对苏美尔文化的热情，实际上拯救了苏美尔的精髓。几乎所有已发现的苏美尔文学作品都是在公元前第二个千年的前半叶抄写的，抄写者往往是学童，而此时苏美尔语作为一种活语言已经消亡；相比之下，从阿卡德人到来之前的时代流传下来的大部分文献，是大量的铭文和行政文件，那时苏美尔城邦骄傲而自由（并且仍然使用苏美尔语）。

It is the Akkadian culture’s enthusiasm for all things Sumerian which has in fact saved Sumer’s finer culture. Almost all the Sumerian literary texts that have been found were copied, often by schoolboys, in the first half of the second millennium, after the death of Sumerian as a living language; by contrast, most of what has come down from the pre-Akkadian days, when the cities of Sumer were proud and free (and still spoke Sumerian), is a mass of inscriptions and administrative documents.

然而，在苏美尔语消亡之后，这长达六百年的苏美尔鼎盛时期最终还是结束了，这表明阿卡德语无法无限期地支撑苏美尔语的发展。公元前1594年，巴比伦被赫梯国王穆尔西里斯攻陷，随后美索不达米亚被喀西特山地部落占领，苏美尔文化的真正价值再也没有恢复。在接下来的第二个和第一个千年里（实际上一直到公元前323年塞琉古帝国统治时期），苏美尔人不再创作任何作品，事实上，只有两部文学作品得以流传：《尼努尔塔的功绩》（我们已经略有提及）以及与之相关的《安吉姆》，讲述了尼努尔塔从山中返回尼普尔的故事。从此以后，其余的苏美尔经典只能通过译本为人所知。

But this six-hundred-year-long Sumerian heyday, after the death of the living language, at last came to an end, and showed that Akkadian could not support it indefinitely. After the fall of Babylon to the marauding Hittite King Mursilis in 1594 BC, and the takeover of Mesopotamia by the Kassite mountain tribes which followed, true appreciation of Sumerian culture never recovered. For the rest of the second and first millennia (indeed down to the Greek takeover under the Seleucid empire in 323 BC), no more Sumerian compositions were attempted, and in fact only two literary texts continued to be copied: The Exploits of Ninurta (which we have already sampled), and a companion piece, Angim, about Ninurta’s return from the mountains to Nippur. Henceforth, the rest of the Sumerian classics would be known only in translation.

正如一位诗人曾评论过（此前一座试图控制苏美尔人的阿卡德城市被摧毁的事件）：

As a poet had remarked (on the earlier destruction of an Akkadian city that aspired to take the Sumerians under their control):

伊里比亚·加图斯·宾杜加·基图斯·努曼达杜格·

加德亚·加努·宾杜加基努·努曼达杜格·阿加德

呼拉·伊纳·扎米。

iribia gatuš bindugga kituš nummandadug

agadea ganu bindugga kinu nummandadug

agade hula inana zami.

那位说“我要住在那座城里”的人，在那里却找不到合适的住处。

He who said ‘I would dwell in that city’ found not a good dwelling place there.

那位说“我要在阿加德睡觉”的人，在那里却找不到一个好的睡觉的地方。

He who said ‘I would sleep in Agade’ found not a good sleeping place there.

阿加德被摧毁了。赞美伊南娜^。15

Agade is destroyed. Praise Inanna.¹⁵

由于阿卡德语最终也注定要被取代——而且取代它的语言并不依赖于古老的楔形文字传统——苏美尔语最终也消亡了。除了伊拉克遗址中尚未被发现的泥板之外，它没有留下任何痕迹。

Since Akkadian too was destined ultimately to be replaced—and when it happened, by a language whose literacy did not depend on the ancient tradition of cuneiform writing—Sumerian was ultimately to die out. Aside from the tablets waiting to be discovered in the tells of Iraq, it left no trace.

第一幕间：埃兰人后来怎么样了？

FIRST INTERLUDE: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ELAMITE?

孕育苏美尔文字的泥质代币似乎十分普遍：这并不奇怪，因为它们在长途贸易中扮演着重要的提货单角色。在苏美尔，以及更东边的舒西姆（希腊人称之为苏萨），即埃兰的中心地带，泥质符号群的出现都是独立发生的。埃兰的象形符号从未超越其最初作为库存记录媒介的阶段，尽管在公元前三千年初期，一种原始的埃兰文字（显然是一种音节文字）就已经在使用。这一发展路线在公元前三千年中期戛然而止，取而代之的是苏美尔文字系统。当时的苏美尔文字系统虽然经过大量调整以适应苏美尔语，但已发展成为一套真正的文字系统。

The clay tokens that had given rise to Sumerian script seem to have been widespread: not surprisingly, since they would have played a key role as bills of lading for long-distance trade. The development into groups of symbols on clay came independently in Sumer, and farther to the east in Shusim (known to the Greeks as Susa), the heartland of Elam. Elam’s pictographic symbols never went far beyond their initial stage as a medium for inventories, although a proto-Elamite script, apparently a syllabary, was in use in the early third millennium. This line of development was aborted in the middle of the third millennium when the Sumerian system, which was by then a true writing system, even if one heavily adapted for the Sumerian language, was taken over.

事实上，埃兰人对阿卡德语的运用远不止于借用文字系统：从公元前2200年起的九百年间，几乎所有已发现的官方铭文都是用阿卡德语书写的。在这段时间的大部分时间里，埃兰都处于其西部某个强权——苏美尔、巴比伦或亚述——的直接政治控制之下。尽管如此，埃兰语在埃兰肯定仍在继续使用，因为到了公元前1300年，埃兰语重新成为官方语言，取代阿卡德语用于除诅咒之外的所有书面用途。 ¹⁶

In fact, Elam went farther than borrowing the writing system: for the nine hundred years from 2200 BC almost all the official inscriptions that have been found are in Akkadian. For much of this time it was under the direct political control of one of the powers to its west, Sumerian, Babylonian or Assyrian. Nevertheless, Elamite must have continued to be spoken in Elam, since in 1300 BC it springs back to life as the official language, replacing Akkadian for all written purposes, except curses.¹⁶

埃兰人后来的事业至少持续了八百年。

Elamite’s subsequent career showed persistence for at least eight hundred years.

自公元前1300年起，埃兰与底格里斯河对岸的邻国之间爆发了一系列战争，这些战争并非总是防御性的。在这些权力斗争的变幻莫测中，埃兰常常经历被外族统治的时期，但凭借着对东南扎格罗斯山脉中一片广袤而易守难攻的腹地——安善——的控制，它得以长期保持独立。安善从未被阿卡德语使用者攻占。 ¹⁷真正的灾难直到公元前7世纪才到来，埃兰人失去了这座堡垒：它被波斯人攻占，而波斯人的进攻也是首次从南方发起。此后，安善被称为帕尔沙（该地区至今仍被称为法尔斯）。

From 1300 BC Elam pursued a succession of wars, not always defensive, with its neighbours from across the Tigris marshes. Through the vagaries of these power struggles, which often resulted in periods of foreign control, Elam was able to retain its independence in the long term through retaining access to a large but defensible hinterland, Anshan, in the Zagros mountains to its south-east, never penetrated by Akkadian speakers.¹⁷ The real disaster came only in the seventh century BC when the Elamites lost this stronghold: it was taken by the Persians, whose attack came, for the first time, from the south. Thereafter Anshan came to be called Parša. (The area is called Fars to this day.)

埃兰人失去了应对紧急情况的安全避难所。几乎就在同时，公元前646年，亚述人亚述巴尼拔攻陷了苏萨。这场灾难终结了埃兰最后一个独立的王国，尽管埃兰人及其语言并未就此消亡。但亚述人惯用的伎俩是，亚述巴尼拔以自己的名义将许多埃兰人驱逐到亚述，据《以斯拉记》（4:9-10）记载，他们被流放到远至巴勒斯坦的撒玛利亚。

The Elamites had lost their safe redoubt for emergencies. Almost at once, in 646, the Assyrian Asshurbanipal sacked Susa. This calamity put an end to the last independent kingdom of Elam, if not to the Elamites or their language. But in the characteristic Assyrian way, Asshurbanipal deported many of the population, to Assyria on his own account, and according to the Book of Ezra (iv.9-10) as far away as Samaria in Palestine.

但此时的局势已不再是美索不达米亚内部权力更迭的传统钟摆式摆动。埃兰人还没来得及亲眼目睹亚述在公元前612年被米底人和巴比伦人征服，便发现自己也落入了巴比伦的统治之下，仅仅一代人的时间，他们又被波斯人征服。这使得埃兰第一次成为世界局势的中心。两代人之后，公元前522年，波斯继承人、安善的继承人大流士（Dārayavauš）掌控了整个波斯帝国，此时的帝国疆域已从埃及和安纳托利亚延伸至印度边境。尽管在他登基后不久，埃兰爆发了两次失败的叛乱，但他仍然选择埃兰作为帝国的中心，以苏萨（他称之为Šušan）为行政首都，而帕尔沙（即安善）则被选为新的礼仪之都，西方更熟知的名称是波斯波利斯。

But events were now moving beyond the traditional pendulum swing of power shifts within Mesopotamia. The Elamites scarcely had the satisfaction of seeing Assyria itself fall to the Medes and Babylonians in 612 before they found themselves under Babylonian control, and then, within a generation, under Persian. This put Elam, for the first time, at the centre of world events. Two generations later, in 522 BC, Darius (Dārayavauš), the Persian heir to Anshan, took control of the whole Persian empire, which by now extended from Egypt and Anatolia to the borders of India. Despite two abortive Elamite rebellions shortly after his accession, he chose Elam as the hub of this empire, with Susa itself (known to him as Šušan) as the administrative capital, and Parša, i.e. Anshan, as the site for a new ceremonial capital, to be better known in the West by its Greek name of Persepolis.

波斯人向来不重视识字。众所周知，他们的统治者只接受过三项教育：骑马、射箭和说真话。因此，拥有两千年楔形文字教育的埃兰邻居，在帝国建设中那些更为琐碎的事务上，自然能发挥极大的作用。

The Persians had never prized literacy very highly. Famously, their leaders were educated in three things only: to ride a horse, to shoot a straight arrow, and to tell the truth. So their Elamite neighbours, with two thousand years of cuneiform education behind them, were well placed to be extremely useful in the more humdrum side of empire-building.

在大流士在其领地周围（尤其是在丝绸之路上的贝希斯敦）竖立的纪念碑式铭文上，不仅有波斯语和阿卡德语，还有埃兰语。尽管帝国的官方语言被指定为阿拉姆语，但显然直到公元前460年左右，中央行政管理实际上是用埃兰语进行的，因为20世纪30年代在波斯波利斯发现了数千份刻在泥板上的行政文件。这些文件很可能要归功于公元前330年亚历山大征服者的纵火焚毁而得以保存。

On the monumental inscriptions that Darius set up round his domains (most notably at Behistun, on the Silk Route), the legend was written not only in Persian and Akkadian but in Elamite. And although the official language of the empire was designated as Aramaic, it is clear that until about 460 the central administration was actually conducted in Elamite, since an archive of several thousand administrative documents on clay was discovered in Persepolis in the 1930s. They most likely owed their preservation to arson by Alexander’s conquering soldiers in 330 BC.

但这些是现存最后的埃兰文献。18^阿拉姆语取代埃兰语成为书面行政语言，而埃兰语由于缺乏维持楔形文字传统的政治焦点，显然停止了书写。之后，或许很久以后，口语也必然消亡了。公元十世纪的阿拉伯作家提到胡齐斯坦地区使用一种既非波斯语、阿拉伯语也非希伯来语的语言：他们没有记录任何词汇，因此无人知晓这是否是埃兰语的最后遗存^。19

But these are the last Elamite documents to have survived anywhere.¹⁸ Aramaic took over as the language of written administration, and Elamite, lacking any political focus to sustain the cuneiform tradition, apparently ceased to be written. Some time later, perhaps much later, the spoken language too must have simply died away. Arabs writing in the tenth century AD mention a language spoken in Khuzistan which was not Persian, Arabic or Hebrew: they do not record any words, so no one knows whether that was the last of Elamite.¹⁹

有人推测，苏美尔和阿卡德为争夺埃兰后方山脉的控制权而进行的斗争，以及山脉中丰富的石头、木材和金属等原材料，可能在当时的文学作品中以某种抽象的方式有所体现。20^在诗歌《尼努尔塔的功绩》 （Lugale u melambi nirgal，英文译为《尼努尔塔的功绩》）中，神祇尼努尔塔向前来探望他征服山脉的母亲致意：

It has been speculated that Sumer and Akkad’s struggles for control of the mountains behind Elam, with their raw material riches in stone, timber and metals, may be reflected somewhat abstractly in the surviving literature of the period.²⁰ In the poem Lugale u melambi nirgal, known in English as The Exploits of Ninurta, the god greets his mother, who has come to visit him in his mountain conquests:

夫人，既然您已来到这片蛮荒之地，

Since you, Madam, have come to the rough lands,

既然您，尊贵的夫人，因为我的名声而来到了敌国，

Since you, Noble Lady, because of my fame, have come to the enemy land,

既然你不畏惧我可怕的战斗，

Since you feared not my terrifying battles,

我，英雄，我堆积如山的罪恶

I, the hero, the mound I had heaped up

它将被命名为胡尔萨格，而你将成为它的女王。

Shall be called hursag, and you shall be its queen,

从今以后，你的名字就叫宁胡尔萨格——就这么定了。

From now on Ninhursag is the name by which you shall be called—thus it shall be.

…

胡尔萨格将为你提供充足的神灵芬芳，

The hursag shall provide you amply with the fragrance of the gods,

必赐予你大量的金银，

Shall provide you with gold and silver in abundance,

我将为你开采铜和锡，并将它们作为贡品运给你。

Shall mine for you copper and tin, shall carry them to you as tribute,

崎岖之地会为你繁衍出大大小小的牛羊。

The rough places shall multiply cattle large and small for you,

胡尔萨格将为你带来所有四足动物的后代^。21

The hursag shall bring forth for you the seed of all four-legged creatures.²¹

事实上，征服埃兰和安善的国王是拉格什的古地亚（公元前2141-2122年），他侍奉的是宁吉尔苏神，而非尼努尔塔神。然而，尼努尔塔是尼普尔的神，而尼普尔后来成为苏美尔城邦的文化中心。因此，主神的更迭赋予了这部作品一种超然的宏伟感，使其更适合成为文学经典。

In fact the king who had achieved the conquest of Elam and Anshan had been Gudea of Lagash (2141-2122 BC): and he served the god Ningirsu, not Ninurta. Still, Ninurta was the god of Nippur, which later became the cultural centre of the Sumerian cities, and so the change of central god would have given the piece a certain disinterested grandeur, which fitted it to be the literary classic it became.

阿卡德语——世界领先的技术：识字模式

Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy

那时，天下人的语言和言语都是一样的。他们向东迁徙，在示拿平原定居下来。他们彼此商量说：“来吧，我们要做砖，把砖烧透。”他们用砖代替石头，用沥青代替灰泥。他们又说：“来吧，我们要建造一座城，一座塔顶通天，好叫我们传扬我们的名，不致分散在全地上。”耶和华降临，要看看世人所建造的城。耶和华说：“看哪，众人同说一种语言，就能成就这样的事！只要他们有心，就能成就很多事。我要下去，使他们的语言变乱，使他们彼此不通。”于是耶和华将他们从那里分散到全地上。他们就停止建造那座城了。所以那地方叫巴比伦（bāběl），因为他在那里变乱了天下人的语言（ bālšl ）。耶和华从那里把他们分散到全地。

Now all the earth had one language and words in common. And moving east, people found a plain in Shinar and settled there. And they said to each other: ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly!’ They used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar. Then they said: ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’ But Yahweh came down to see the city that the sons of man were building. And Yahweh said: ‘So this is what they can do when all share one language! There will be no limit on what they can accomplish if they have a mind for it. I shall go down and stupefy their languages so that they may not understand one another.’ So Yahweh scattered them from there all over the earth. And they stopped building the city. That is why it is called Babylon (bāběl) because there he mixed up (bālšl) the language of all the earth. And from there Yahweh scattered them all over the earth.

希伯来圣经，创世记第十章

Hebrew scriptures, Genesis x

这个犹太神话显然受到了巴比伦这座国际化都市宏伟建筑和街头巷尾多元语言交织的启发，至今仍对欧洲文化具有深刻的象征意义。然而，其中傲慢的超级大国与嫉妒的神祇之间冲突的核心机制却不知何故被忽略了。如今，它被解读为一种语言如何带来团结的故事，这种团结对于完成一项宏伟的事业至关重要：只要语言混乱，合作便无从谈起。因此，作为巴比伦的寓言，它显得格格不入，因为巴比伦在其历史上一直以单一语言为主导地位。近两千年来，这种语言一直是阿卡德语，尽管如前所述，在其帝国的最后几个世纪里，它逐渐被阿拉姆语所取代。

This Jewish myth, evidently inspired by the stupendous architecture on show in the cosmopolitan city of Babylon, and the polyphony of languages to be heard on its streets, is still deeply symbolic for European culture. But somehow the central mechanism of conflict between an arrogant superpower and a jealous god has been lost. It is now taken as a story of how a single language can give unity, the kind of unity that is necessary to bring off a magnificent enterprise: just confound their languages, and cooperation becomes impossible. As such, it is bizarrely ill placed as a fable of Babylon, which was notable throughout its history for the leading role of a single language. For almost two thousand years this language was Akkadian, although in the last few centuries of its empire, as already seen, it yielded to Aramaic.

或许，巴比伦人四散奔逃、四分五裂的景象，对六世纪被巴比伦皇帝尼布甲尼撒二世驱逐出家园的犹太人来说，是一种慰藉，一种愿望的实现。或许，这甚至可以被视为对七世纪亚述人亚述巴尼拔攻陷巴比伦的一种讽刺：毕竟，许多巴比伦传统主义者肯定对那些粗犷的阿拉米人不断扩张的影响力感到质疑，并猜测这不会带来任何好处。然而，尽管巴比伦最终失去了昔日的辉煌——事实上，在尼布甲尼撒之后不久——但它的衰落不能归咎于语言的衰落或沟通的失败。在波斯人和希腊人夺走他们的一切权力之后，人们仍然继续说阿拉米语，学习阿卡德语，这种情况持续了数个世纪。

Perhaps the dream of Babylonians scattered and disorganised was a comforting exercise in wish fulfilment for the sixth-century Jews who had been shattered and driven from their homeland by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadrezzar II. Perhaps it might even be taken as an ironic comment on how the Assyrian Asshurbanipal had been able to sack Babylon in the seventh century: many Babylonian traditionalists must after all have questioned the spreading influence of those rough-talking Aramaeans, and speculated that no good would come of it. But although Babylon was to lose its glory in time—indeed, very soon after Nebuchadrezzar—its decline cannot be blamed on language decadence, or some failure in communication. People went on speaking Aramaic, and studying Akkadian, for many centuries after the Persians, and then the Greeks, had taken away all their power.

然而，在其鼎盛时期，阿卡德语是权力和影响力的象征。如果说苏美尔语是作为教育标准的试金石而传播到苏美尔以外的，那么阿卡德语则是凭借经济和政治声望而传播开来。

Yet at its acme, Akkadian was pre-eminently a language of power and influence. If Sumerian had spread beyond Sumer as the touchstone of an educational standard, Akkadian spread through economic and political prestige.

阿卡德语得名于阿卡德（Agade 或 Akkad），它曾是美索不达米亚南部的主要城市，但其具体位置如今已成谜。（它可能离巴比伦不远。）关于阿卡德语的记载真正开始于公元前三千年中期，并在萨尔贡的征服中达到鼎盛时期（萨尔贡的统治时期主要集中在公元前24世纪末至23世纪初）。他向四面八方成功征战，不仅将阿卡德语推广到北方（马里和埃勃拉），而且在西部的埃兰也开启了阿卡德语长达千年的官方统治。我们已经看到，这第一次帝国鼎盛时期之后，到了第四代（公元前22世纪末）便走向衰落，随后被征服地区的人民经历了短暂的语言复兴，苏美尔语和埃兰语重新成为官方语言，并持续使用了一个世纪左右。然而不久之后，说闪米特语的“西方人”阿摩利人开始出现在美索不达米亚各地。^*他们的迁徙并未在政治上加强阿卡德，但似乎排挤了除阿卡德语以外的其他语言作为交流工具的广泛使用；从公元前第二个千年开始，除文学作品外，所有书面记录都使用阿卡德语。

Akkadian is named after Agade or Akkad, once the major city of southern Mesopotamia but whose location is now a mystery. (It was possibly not far from Babylon.) Records of the language begin in earnest with the middle of the third millennium, with an early climax in those conquests by Sargon (whose long reign centred on the turn of the twenty-fourth and twenty-third centuries BC). He campaigned successfully in all directions, thus not only spreading the official use of Akkadian in the north (Mari and Ebla), but also beginning a millennium-long official dominance of the language in Elam to the west. We have seen that this first fit of imperial exuberance was followed by a collapse in the fourth generation (end of the twenty-second century BC), and a brief linguistic resurgence of the subject populations, with the return of Sumerian and Elamite to official use for a century or so. Soon, however, the Amorites, Semitic-speaking ‘Westerners’, began to make their appearance all over Mesopotamia.^* Their movements did not strengthen Akkad politically, but did seem to crowd out the wide-scale use of anything but Akkadian as a means of communication; and the written record (outside literature) from the beginning of the second millennium is exclusively in this language.

早期，阿卡德语和苏美尔语之间存在某种程度的平等，或许还有一些功能上的分工：我们已经提到，萨尔贡的女儿就是一位技艺精湛的苏美尔语诗人。但这种双语现象并不稳定。阿卡德语因其在日常书写活动中的广泛使用，以及与西方闪米特语系语言一定程度的互通性，巩固了其在肥沃新月地带的主要语言地位；而苏美尔语的地位则仅取决于其在教育和文化中的作用。巴比伦崛起时期（公元前2000-1600年）苏美尔语的地位依然稳固，但当权力基础瓦解，外来统治者（喀西特人）接管政权后，认真学习苏美尔语似乎变得无关紧要。它仅仅作为阿卡德语学习的辅助手段而被保留下来，就像英语词典末尾有时还能找到的拉丁语词条列表一样。

In the early days, there was some parity, and perhaps some specialisation of function, as between Akkadian and Sumerian: we have already noted that Sargon’s own daughter had been an accomplished poetess in Sumerian. But the bilingualism proved unstable. While Akkadian was fortified as the major language of the Fertile Crescent by its everyday use for all literate purposes, and some degree of mutual intelligibility with the Semitic languages of the west, Sumerian was guaranteed only by its role in education and culture. The period of the rise of Babylon (2000-1600 BC) still fostered this, but when the power bases were shattered, and foreign rulers (the Kassites) took over, serious learning in Sumerian must have seemed an irrelevance. It was retained merely as an adjunct to Akkadian studies, in the same spirit as the list of Latin tags sometimes still found at the end of an English dictionary.

这一“古巴比伦”时期对阿卡德语的重要性不亚于对苏美尔语的重要性，但意义却有所不同。正是在这一时期，南方（巴比伦）和北方（亚述）之间一些细微的方言差异开始显现。阿卡德语的不同方言也出现在更远的地方，例如马里、苏萨以及东部的迪亚拉河谷。各个时期的文字都有留存，为研究口语提供了最有力的证据。

This ‘Old Babylonian’ period turned out to be as significant for Akkadian as it was for Sumerian, but in a different way. It was in this period that some fairly slight dialect differences are first noticeable between the south (Babylonian) and the north (Assyrian). Different dialects of Akkadian also become visible farther afield, in Mari, in Susa and to the east in the valley of the Diyala. Letters are extant from all periods, and provide the best evidence for spoken language.

与此同时，巴比伦方言（甚至巴比伦人自己也称之为阿卡杜语）确立了其文学标准语的地位，其经典版本在整个美索不达米亚地区被用于官方用途。这种特权地位在巴比伦语的整个历史进程中都得以延续，基本上不受巴比伦、亚述或两者皆非当时政治权力中心的影响。古典巴比伦语的典范是公元前18世纪编纂的《汉谟拉比法典》，当时这种方言仍然是通用语。但最著名的文学作品，例如《吉尔伽美什史诗》和《埃努玛·埃利什》（意为“当在高处……”，即创世史诗），也是用这种方言写成的，只是成书于这种方言不再流行之后。

At the same time, the dialect of Babylon (which even the Babylonians still called Akkadū) became established as the literary standard, the classic version of which would be used for official purposes throughout Mesopotamia. This privileged position endured for the rest of the language’s history, essentially regardless of whether Babylon, Assyria or neither of them was the current centre of political power. The great model of classic Babylonian is the Laws of Hammurabi, compiled in the eighteenth century BC when this dialect was still the vernacular. But the best-known literary texts, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma eliš (’When on high …’, the Creation Epic), are also in this dialect, written down when it was no longer current.

在北方，阿卡德语的使用大约在公元前600年左右消亡，完全被阿拉米语所取代。但在巴比伦，阿卡德语的使用一直持续到公元1世纪初；到那时，似乎大部分阿卡德语知识都掌握在专业抄写员手中，他们甚至会阅读、书写和翻译私人信件——但不可避免地会受到他们实际思考和交谈时所使用的阿拉米语的影响。

In the north, the use of Akkadian was to die out about 600 BC, fully replaced by Aramaic. But use of the language persisted in Babylon till the beginning of the first century AD; it seems that by this stage most of the knowledge of the language was in the hands of professional scribes, who would read, write and translate even personal letters—but not without interference from the Aramaic in which they were actually thinking and talking.

除了作为美索不达米亚大多数居民的母语，以及作为闪米特人最早的书面语言之外，阿卡德语还逐渐成为外来者之间的通用语。这怎么可能呢？归根结底，是因为它与当时最先进的技术——文字——紧密相连。

Besides its use as a native language by most of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, and its historic role as the first language of literacy for Semites anywhere, Akkadian also came to achieve a wider role as a lingua franca among utter foreigners. How was this possible? Ultimately, it was due to its association with the most sophisticated technology of its day, writing.

这种国际化传播的最早证据是亚述商人在安纳托利亚中部托罗斯山脉以北的地区，在尼萨斯和哈图沙斯（现代地图上的库尔特佩和博阿兹科伊）之间建立的一系列市场中心或商站（卡鲁姆）的活动。这发生在公元前1950年至1750年，即第二个千年的第一个四分之一时期。这些商人来自亚述的富裕家庭，他们使用驴队穿越托罗斯山脉进行运输。他们的目的是进行金属贸易：他们发现了银、金和铜的矿藏。反方向，他们则运来锡、山羊毛毡、纺织品和香水。这些商人显然愿意向当地的哈梯当局缴纳关税。这一点可以从他们留下的贸易信函（用泥板书写，装在泥信封里）中得知，这些信函是用古亚述语（阿卡德语的一种方言）写成的。

The first evidence of this cosmopolitan spread is the activity of Assyrian merchants in central Anatolia far to the north of the Taurus mountains, in a complex of market centres or karum set up between Nesas and Hattusas (Kültepe and Boğaz Köy on modern maps). This was in the first quarter of the second millennium, 1950-1750 BC. The merchants came from rich families of Asshur, and used donkey caravans for transport through the Taurus mountains. Their motive was trade in metals: they had found a source of silver, gold and copper. In the reverse direction, they brought tin, goat-hair felt, woven textiles and perfumes. The traders were apparently ready to pay duties to the local Hatti authorities. This is known from the trading correspondence (on clay tablets in clay envelopes) which they left behind, written in Old Assyrian, a dialect of Akkadian.

这种贸易似乎在公元前1750年左右结束，或许是由于人类的入侵，或许是由于赫梯扩张的最初迹象，即库萨拉国王的征战。然而，当我们在大约四百年后于尼萨斯-哈图萨斯地区写成的赫梯人最早的编年史中发现相关记载时，这已是遥远的记忆。这些编年史是用楔形文字书写的，大量使用了苏美尔语和阿卡德语的表意符号，而这些表意符号本身又源于阿卡德语传统。

The trade seems to have been ended around 1750, perhaps by Human incursions, perhaps by the first stirrings of Hittite expansion, the campaigns of the kings of Kussara. This, however, was already a distant memory by the time we find it described in the earliest chronicles of the Hittites themselves, written in the Nesas-Hattusas area about four hundred years later. And these, of course, are written in a cuneiform script, with copious use of Sumerian and Akkadian logograms, which itself derived from the Akkadian tradition.

赫梯人只是周边国家识字阶层接受阿卡德语的一个例子。在公元前第二个千年，阿卡德语在美索不达米亚周边所有首都城市都有教授和使用，基本上不受当地语言的影响。仅从目前发现的公元前第二个千年中期的文献来看，我们可以看到，同样的苏美尔语系在苏萨（埃兰语使用者）、努齐（今基尔库克附近的约尔甘特佩）（胡里安语使用者）、哈图沙（赫梯语和卢维语使用者）、地中海沿岸附近的阿拉拉和乌加里特（其他闪米特语使用者以及人类语言使用者）以及阿赫塔顿（曾短暂成为埃及首都）（埃及人）都采用这种语言体系。

The Hittites provide just one example of how Akkadian was taken up by the literate class in surrounding states. In the second millennium, Akkadian was being taught and used in every capital city that surrounded Mesopotamia, essentially regardless of the ambient language. Just going by the documents so far found which date from the middle of the second millennium, we can see that the same Sumerian edubba system was being practised in Susa for Elamite speakers, in Nuzi (modern Yorgan Tepe near Kirkuk) for Hurrians, in Hattusas for Hittites and Luwians, in Alalah and Ugarit near the Mediterranean coast for speakers of other Semitic languages as well as Human, and in Akhetaten (briefly the Egyptian capital) for Egyptians.

各个民族的语言状况各有不同：例如，在这一时期，埃兰似乎存在不同的人口群体，北部平原地区主要使用阿卡德语，南部山区则主要使用埃兰语；而乌加里特则普遍存在双语现象，因此，一些供国内阅读的阿卡德语文本可能会附上乌加里特语的注释。 ²²但无论国内情况如何，普遍的做法似乎是使用阿卡德语进行国际通信，尤其是条约。

The linguistic situations of the various nations were differently nuanced: in this period it seems that Elam, for example, had different segments of the population using predominantly either Akkadian (in the northern plain) or Elamite (in the mountainous south), while in Ugarit there was a much more general bilingualism, so that texts in Akkadian intended for home consumption may be tricked out with the odd explanatory gloss in Ugaritic.²² But whatever the home situation, the general practice seemed to be that Akkadian was used for international correspondence, and often for treaties.

阿玛纳信件就是一个经典的例证。这是一批公元前十四世纪的外交信件，发现于当时的埃及首都阿玛纳遗址。这批信件及其附件共计350封，除三封外，其余均为阿卡德语（两封为赫梯语，一封为胡曼语）。

The classic demonstration of this is the Amarna correspondence, a cache of diplomatic letters from the fourteenth century BC, found on the site of the then Egyptian capital. There are 350 letters and attachments in this collection, and all but three are in Akkadian (two in Hittite and one in Human).

思考阿卡德语如何成为国际通用语，是一件很有意思的事情。公元前第二个千年中期对于闪米特语系的使用者来说并非一段辉煌的时期。公元前1400年，巴比伦已被加喜特人牢牢控制了两个世纪，亚述也已臣服于米坦尼人一个世纪。在叙利亚北部，米坦尼人既有的统治地位正受到赫梯人的挑战。而巴勒斯坦的其他地区则是由埃及统治下的众多附庸国组成的。

It is interesting to reflect on how Akkadian had achieved this role as an international lingua franca. The middle of the second millennium was not a glorious period for the speakers of Semitic languages. In 1400 BC Babylon had been firmly under Kassite control for two centuries, and Assyria in vassalage to the Mitanni for a century. In northern Syria, established Mitanni control was being disputed by the Hittites. And the rest of Palestine was a collection of vassal states under Egyptian sovereignty.

因此，并非近期的政治影响使阿卡德语成为当时的常用语言。唯一的解释是文化因素，特别是识字率以及文书官（edubba）的文化。

It was not recent political influence, then, which made Akkadian the language of convenience at this time. The only explanation is a cultural one, and specifically the matter of literacy, and the culture of the scribal edubba.

除了埃及及其贸易伙伴腓尼基之外，其他所有强国都在前一千年间通过吸收苏美尔和阿卡德的楔形文字文化而获得了文字。正如我们所见，这种文字系统极其忠于其原始语言，其中穿插着音标符号，这些符号只有在苏美尔语和阿卡德语中才能通过双关语来理解，并且其教学实践是通过大规模抄写苏美尔和阿卡德文学经典来实现的。尽管巴比伦和亚述都渴望成为世界帝国——而且它们都至少一度自视为整个新月沃土的霸主——但它们的文化统治地位几乎完全取决于它们在共同的语言技术方面处于领先地位。

With the exception of Egypt, and its trading partners in Phoenicia, every one of the powers had become literate in the course of the previous millennium through absorbing the cuneiform culture of Sumer and Akkad. As we have seen, this writing system was extremely committed to its original languages, shot through with phonetic symbols that only made sense in terms of puns in Sumerian and Akkadian, and taught in practice through large-scale copying of the classics of Sumerian and Akkadian literature. Although Babylonia and Assyria aspired to be world empires—and both would see themselves at least once more as mistress of the whole Fertile Crescent—their cultural dominance was almost wholly a matter of having been the leaders in a shared language technology.

阿卡德语历史上的下一个，也是最后一个重大问题是：为什么它的统治地位乃至使用会走向终结？阿卡德语的历史告诉我们，语言的兴衰原则上与其所属国家的政治命运无关。有趣的是，阿卡德语在亚述-巴比伦帝国长期衰落期间达到了其声望和传播的顶峰，而它的衰落却始于亚述帝国鼎盛时期。

The next, and last, great question in the history of Akkadian is why its dominance, and indeed its use, came to an end. One thing that the history of this language does teach is that the life and death of languages are in principle detached from the political fortunes of their associated states. For curiously, just as Akkadian had reached the height of its prestige and extension during a long eclipse of Assyro-Babylonian power, its decline began when the Assyrian empire was at its zenith.

越是深入思考，这个悖论就越发凸显。阿卡德语不仅在其政治影响力鼎盛时期被取代，而且其替代语言阿拉米语直到不久前还主要由游牧民族使用。这些游牧民族没有任何文化优势，也极不可能建立起与之抗衡的文明。人们原本预期，阿拉米语使用者会像八百年前入侵巴比伦的喀西特人一样，在文化和语言上融入伟大的美索不达米亚传统。毕竟，类似的情况也发生在其他入侵强大帝国的民族身上——例如入侵罗马帝国的日耳曼人，以及入侵中国的蒙古人。

The paradox deepens the more closely it is considered. Not only was Akkadian, the language replaced, at the height of its political influence: its replacement language, Aramaic, had until recently been spoken mainly by nomads. These people could claim no cultural advantage, and were highly unlikely to set up a rival civilisation. The expectation would have been that, like the Kassites eight hundred years before in Babylon, Aramaic speakers would have been culturally and linguistically assimilated to the great Mesopotamian tradition. Similar things, after all, were to happen to others who burst in upon great empires—the Germans invading the Roman empire, or the Mongols the Chinese.

但阿拉米语使用者在文化领域带来了最大的惊喜。诚然，他们在很大程度上融入了阿卡德文化。但在一个至关重要的方面，他们却截然不同，那就是语言技术的划时代变革。阿拉米语带来了一种新的书写传统，即使用字母文字。伴随语言表达方式的这场革命，也出现了新的书写材料：人们开始在新的媒介——纸莎草纸或皮革上书写笔记，以及越来越多的正式记录和文学作品。

But it was in the cultural sphere that the Aramaic speakers brought their greatest surprise. They did assimilate largely to Akkadian culture, certainly. But there was one crucial respect in which they did not, the epoch-making one of language technology. With Aramaic came a new tradition of writing, which used an alphabetic script. Along with this revolution in language representation came new writing materials: people wrote their notes, and increasingly their formal records and literary texts, on new media, sheets of papyrus or leather.

这些变化深入亚述和巴比伦文化的核心；以至于传统观点认为，正是这些变化解释了阿拉米语的胜利。例如，乔治·鲁克斯写道：“然而，这些野蛮的阿拉米人却获得了将他们的语言强加于整个近东的特权。这部分归功于他们庞大的人口数量，部分归功于他们采用了略加修改的腓尼基字母，而不是繁琐的楔形文字，并将这种简单实用的未来文字带到了世界各地。” ²³约翰·索耶也认为：“阿拉米语的成功无疑主要归功于它使用了一种相对简单的字母文字书写。” ²⁴

These changes went to the heart of Assyrian and Babylonian culture; so much so that the traditional view has been that it explains the triumph of Aramaic as a language. So Georges Roux, for example, writes: ‘Yet to these barbaric Aramaeans befell the privilege of imposing their language upon the entire Near East. They owed it partly to the sheer weight of their number and partly to the fact that they adopted, instead of the cumbersome cuneiform writing, the Phoenician alphabet slightly modified, and carried everywhere with them the simple, practical script of the future.’²³ And John Sawyer: ‘The success of Aramaic was undoubtedly due in the main to the fact that it was written in a relatively easy alphabetical script.’²⁴

这肯定不对。毕竟，文字系统的存在是为了记录人们所说的话，而不是反过来。历史上从未有过文字技术的变革导致大众语言发生变化的先例。即便这种可能性存在，在亚述帝国这样的社会中也几乎不可能发生，因为那里识字人口的比例极低。阿拉米语文字系统变革的真正意义在于，它为阿拉米悖论增添了一个新的维度：像阿拉米人这样流动性强、政治地位低下的群体，究竟是如何传播自己的语言，并使其文字系统被其文化和政治统治者——亚述人和巴比伦人——所接受的呢？

This cannot be right. Writing systems, after all, exist to record what people say, not vice versa. There is no other case in history of a change in writing technology inducing a change in popular speech. And even if it were possible, it is particularly unlikely in a society like the Assyrian empire, where a vanishingly small portion of the population were literate. The real significance of the change in writing system that came with the Aramaic is to give an extra dimension to the Aramaic paradox: how could a mobile, and politically subservient, group such as the Aramaeans not only spread its language but also get its writing system accepted among its cultural and political masters, the Assyrians and Babylonians?

答案在于亚述军事政策的一个意想不到的影响。

The answer lies in an unexpected effect of Assyrian military policy.

我们之前已经提到，阿拉米游牧民族与亚述人之间的首次敌对接触发生在十二世纪末。阿拉米人从叙利亚北部的荒野而来，很可能是凭借武力，在叙利亚所有有人居住的地区定居下来。他们的活动范围并不局限于大马士革地区，而是向北、向南，尤其重要的是向东扩展。幼发拉底河上游，巴利赫河和哈布尔河之间的整个区域被称为“河流之亚兰”（Aram Naharaim）。他们稳步向南推进，直抵巴比伦：十一世纪中叶，他们摧毁了西帕尔的沙玛什神庙；到了十世纪初，他们已经在巴比伦周围定居下来，切断了巴比伦与其郊区巴尔西帕的联系，从而阻止了新年庆典的正常举行。新年庆典需要马尔杜克和纳布的神像往返于巴比伦之间。与此同时，在北方，亚述人的抵抗同样无法阻止他们的推进，到九世纪初，他们已经兵临底格里斯河畔。

We have already noted the first hostile contacts between the Aramaean nomads and the Assyrians, at the end of the twelfth century. The Aramaeans, coming in from the wilderness of northern Syria, were able, presumably by force of arms, to settle all over the inhabited parts of that country. They did not limit themselves to the area of Damascus, but spread out north, south and, significantly, to the east. The whole area of the upper reaches of the Euphrates between the rivers Balikh and Khabur became known as Aram Naharaim, ‘Aram of the Rivers’. Their progress southward towards Babylon was steady: they smashed the temple of Shamash in Sippar in the middle of the eleventh century, and by the early tenth century were sufficiently settled around Babylon to cut it off from its suburb Barsippa, and so prevent the proper celebration of New Year Festival, which required the idols of Marduk and Nabu to process to and from Babylon. Meanwhile, in the north, Assyrian resistance proved equally unable to stop their advance, and by the beginning of the ninth century they were on the banks of the Tigris itself.

第一次成功的抵抗来自亚述国王阿达德·尼尔什里（公元前911-891年），他将阿拉米人逐出了底格里斯河谷和北部的卡希亚里山脉。此后，亚述国王开始推行每年一次的侵略政策，即对邻国发动战争，这种肆无忌惮的侵略政策持续了150多年，仅在公元前827-811年和公元前754-745年的两次重大内战期间，侵略转向内部时才有所停歇。不到一百年，整个新月沃土都落入了他们的控制之下，此外还包括南安纳托利亚直至塔尔苏斯，以及东部埃兰的大片领土。更远的地方，他们还对乌拉尔图（安纳托利亚东部）进行了一次惩罚性远征，甚至还短暂入侵了埃及，但最终未能持久。

The first successful resistance came from the Assyrian king Adad-niršri (911-891 BC), who drove the Aramaeans out of the Tigris valley and the Kashiari mountains to the north. Thereafter, the Assyrian kings began a policy of annual campaigns against one or other of their neighbours, a policy of unrestrained aggression which lasted over 150 years, pausing only when the aggression turned inward, during the major civil wars of 827-811 and 754-745. Within a hundred years the whole Fertile Crescent was under their control, together with southern Anatolia as far as Tarsus, and large swathes of Elam in the east. Farther afield, they undertook a punitive expedition deep into Urartu (eastern Anatolia) and even a brief, but unsustainable, invasion of Egypt.

对于亚述而言，这的确是辉煌的时代，但这似乎也是这些战争的唯一目的：胜利之后，战败的城市或部落便会被迫缴纳巨额贡赋。无论是亚述的商业信函还是考古记录，都找不到任何此后传播亚述文化，甚至扩大统治阶层基础的尝试。财富的转移是单向的，而且是通过武力夺取的。从提格拉特帕拉沙尔三世（744-727 年）到辛那赫里布（704-681 年），一种新的策略被引入：大量被征服的人口被驱逐到帝国遥远的其他地方。据估计，提格拉特帕拉沙尔三世进行了 37 次驱逐（共计 368,543 人），萨尔贡二世进行了 38 次（共计 217,635 人），辛那赫里布进行了 20 次（共计 408,150 人）。总而言之，亚述人声称在三个世纪里驱逐了约450万人^。25

Truly these were glory days for Assyria, but that seems to have been the sole point of these wars: after a victory, a ruinous demand for tribute was imposed on the defeated city or tribe. There is no evidence, in Assyrian business correspondence or the archaeological record, of any subsequent attempt to spread Assyrian culture thereafter, or even to establish the ruling caste on a wider basis. Wealth was transferred one way, and at the point of a sword. From Tiglath-Pileser III (744-727) to Sennacherib (704-681), a new tactic was added: vast numbers of the conquered populations were led off to some other distant part of the empire. Estimates attribute thirty-seven deportations to Tiglath-Pileser III (totalling 368,543 people), thirty-eight to Sargon II (totalling 217,635), twenty to Sennacherib (totalling 408,150). All in all, the Assyrians claimed to have displaced some 4.5 million persons over three centuries.²⁵

这些驱逐行动中的大多数都涉及阿拉姆语使用者，尽管最著名的一次是公元前 721 年萨尔贡二世对以色列首都撒玛利亚进行的驱逐，那次驱逐可能涉及希伯来语使用者：

A majority of these deportations would have involved Aramaic speakers, although the most famous, carried out by Sargon II against Samaria, capital of Israel, in 721 BC, probably involved speakers of Hebrew:

在我统治之初，我为了庇佑我取得这场胜利的神明，攻占了撒玛利亚人的城池。我俘虏了城中27290名居民，并从中挑选士兵，为我的皇家军团配备了50辆战车……我将这座城池重建得比以前更加繁荣，并将我征服的各国人民安置于此。我任命一名官员担任他们的总督，并像对待亚述公民一样向他们征收贡赋^。26

At the beginning of my rule, I took the town of the Samarians for the god … who let me achieve this triumph. I led away as prisoners 27,290 inhabitants of it and equipped from among them soldiers to man 50 chariots for my royal corps …The town I rebuilt better than it was before and settled therein people from countries which I myself had conquered. I placed an officer of mine as governor over them and imposed upon them tribute as for Assyrian citizens.²⁶

希伯来圣经（列王纪下 17:6, 24）更详细地记载了以色列流亡者被流放到的地点（包括哈布尔河畔的亚兰拿哈林，以及帝国东北部的米底），以及被派去取代他们的人。（其中包括一些巴比伦人。）

The Hebrew scriptures (2 Kings xvii.6, 24) give more details of where the Israelite exiles were sent (including Aram Naharaim on the Khabur river, and the north-eastern extremity of the empire in Media), and of who were sent to replace them. (They included some Babylonians.)

偶尔，一些信件能让我们了解这些被驱逐者抵达美索不达米亚时人们是如何看待他们的。27一封写给国王的信将“尼尼微的古老家族”（qinnāte ša Ninua labīrūti）与^“社会暴发户” （nasi'ānni）和“被驱逐者” （šaglūti ）进行了对比，后者或许是对“无知者” （šaklūti ）的谐音。但很明显，拥有西闪米特语名字的人往往被委以重任。

Now and then, correspondence gives an insight into how these deportees were viewed when they arrived in Mesopotamia.²⁷ A letter to the king contrasts qinnāte ša Ninua labīrūti, ‘old-time families of Nineveh’, with nasi’ānni, ‘social upstarts’, and šaglūti, ‘deportees’, itself perhaps a pun on šaklūti, ‘ignorants’. But it is clear that people with western Semitic names were often entrusted with significant responsibility.

这种对亚述臣民的驱散，可以被视为一项精明的政策，旨在通过切断他们与自身传统的联系来统一帝国境内多元化的人口——一种强加的“熔炉”式解决方案。28^正如上述铭文所述，所有被驱逐者都应“被视为亚述人”；因此，他们被认为有义务“敬畏上帝和国王”。

This scattering of Assyria’s subject peoples could be seen as a shrewd policy to unify the diverse populations of the empire by cutting them off from their traditions—an imposed ‘melting pot’ solution.²⁸ All deportees, as the above inscription mentioned, are to be ‘regarded as Assyrians’; as such they were deemed to have a duty to palā ili u šarri, ‘to fear God and King’.

另一项旨在巩固帝国统一的新政策也朝着同一方向发展，即招募皇家卫队——基西尔·沙鲁提（kisir šarruti）。这支卫队从非美索不达米亚行省招募人员，以补充组织更为封建化的亚述军队。事实上，拥有西闪米特语名字的人在亚述军队中担任军官的情况相当普遍。其中，由伊图部落的阿拉米人组成的伊图阿亚（Itu'aia）部队尤为著名，他们出现在许多热点地区，负责镇压巴比伦行省内部的异议。 ²⁹

Tending in the same direction was another new policy to buttress imperial unity, the recruitment of a royal guard, the kisir šarruti. This was drawn from non-Mesopotamian provinces, supplementing the more feudally organised Assyrian troops. In fact, bearers of western Semitic names crop up quite commonly as Assyrian army officers. Particularly famous was the force of Itu ’aia, made up of Aramaeans of the Itu ’ tribe, which turns up at many of the hot spots, on duty to crush dissent within Babylonian provinces.²⁹

因此，公元前11世纪至公元前8世纪期间，新月沃土的人口流动性极大。阿拉米人在前两个世纪已遍布整个地区，尽管在后两个世纪他们受到更有效的国家控制，但亚述的政策非但没有将他们驱逐，反而使他们更加分散，或被迫迁徙，或成为军队成员。由于阿拉米人是以这种方式分散的最大群体，当其他西闪米特人，例如以色列人或腓尼基人，迁徙到此时，他们往往会发现自己的语言越来越接近新邻居^。

The situation in the Fertile Crescent, then, over the period of the eleventh to the eighth century BC, was one of an extreme flux of populations. Aramaeans had settled themselves over the whole area in the earlier two centuries, and although they had been under more effective state control in the latter two, Assyrian policy had served not to push them back but to distribute them even more widely, either as forced migrants, or as members of the armed forces. Since the Aramaeans were the largest group being scattered in this way, when other western Semites, such as Israelites or Phoenicians, found themselves transplanted, they could tend to find themselves speaking more and more like their new neighbours.^*

因此，亚述人设法在其领土内推广一种新的通用语，这种语言不依赖于识字或任何共同的教育传统。随着亚述领土的进一步扩张，这种通用语的有效性也随之增强，其以阿拉姆语为主的西闪米特语人口数量逐渐超过了美索不达米亚原住民阿卡德语人口。亚述、尼尼微和卡尔胡（尼姆鲁德）这三个都城的统治阶级保持了相对的连续性，但在其他地方，社会流动性日益增强，人们不得不与新来者达成妥协。尤其是在巴比伦，这种情况很可能很早就发生了。

The Assyrians had therefore contrived to reinforce the spread of a new lingua franca across their domains, one that was not dependent on literacy or any shared educational tradition. Its effective usefulness would have increased as the Assyrian domain was spread yet wider, and its population of western Semitic speakers, predominantly Aramaic speakers, came to outnumber more and more the original population of Mesopotamia, who spoke Akkadian. The ruling class in the triad of capital cities, Asshur, Nineveh and Kalhu (Nimrud), maintained continuity, but elsewhere there was increasing social flux, and people had to make accommodations with the newcomers. In Babylon, particularly, this must have happened early on.

新来者并非因缺乏文明的基本技能——读写能力——而处于劣势。尽管阿拉米人最初以游牧民族的身份出现，人们普遍认为他们是文盲，但早在公元第一个千年之前，他们就已经开始占领城市（最著名的是大马士革）乃至整个国家（赫梯的最后一个王国，其首都位于今天的津吉尔利，即如今土耳其哈塔伊省境内）。他们中的许多人后来都认识到了文字的价值，而且由于他们所知的城市位于西方，他们所学习的文字系统也相对简单，属于字母文字。

Nor were the newcomers handicapped by lack of the basic art of civilisation, literacy. Although the Aramaeans had appeared originally as nomads, presumed illiterate, they had even before the first millennium begun taking over cities (most notably Damascus) and whole countries (the last Hittite kingdom, its capital at modern Zincirli, in the Turkish province still known as Hatay). Many of them would have come to know the value of writing, and since the cities they knew were of the west, the writing system they would have learnt was simple and alphabetic.

随着他们向东迁徙，我们只能推测字母文字至少在部分阿拉米人中传播开来，因为墨水和纸莎草或皮革等新材料都是可生物降解的，无法在考古记录中保存下来。事实上，现存最早的阿拉米语铭文，在当时与迦南语系语言并无明显区别，可以追溯到公元前九世纪中期。 ³⁰新媒介的短期实用优势（体积更小、容量更大）必定很快就产生了影响。阿卡德语中出现了一个表示“抄写员”的新词：sēpiru ，它取代了旧词upsarru （意为“泥板书写者”），而upsarru的词源可以追溯到苏美尔语的dubsar。八世纪中期的抄写员工作图显示，他们通常两人一组，一人拿着尖笔和泥板，另一人拿着钢笔和一张纸莎草或羊皮纸。就像计算机的出现一样，优秀的官僚必定确保了新旧制度长期共存：直到公元前610年亚述帝国被米底人摧毁后，亚述才真正实现了“无泥土官职”。

As they moved eastward, we can only presume that alphabetic literacy spread with at least some of the Aramaeans, since the new materials, ink and papyrus or leather, are biodegradable, and do not survive in the archaeological record. In fact, the earliest inscriptions in Aramaic, not clearly distinguishable from Canaanite languages at this time, are from the middle of the ninth century.³⁰ The short-term practical advantages of the new media (less bulk, greater capacity) must soon have made an impression. A new word for ‘scribe’ came into use in Akkadian, sēpiru, as opposed to the old upsarru, ‘tablet writer’, which went right back to the Sumerian word dubsar. Pictures of scribes at work from the mid-eighth century show them in pairs, one with a stylus and a tablet, the other with a pen and a sheet of papyrus or parchment. As with the onset of computers, good bureaucrats must have ensured that the old and the new coexisted for a long time: the ‘clay-free office’ did not happen in Assyria till the destruction of the empire by the Medes in 610 BC

最终结果似乎是，阿卡德语的口语使用逐渐被阿拉姆语取代，几乎没有人抱怨。乌尔的一位官员曾请求允许用阿拉姆语给国王写信。 ³¹但在任何阿卡德语泥板上都未发现任何迂腐或纯粹主义的抱怨。我们所能找到的最接近的例子是抄写员与萨尔贡国王（721-705 年）之间的一封信：

The net result seems to have been that spoken use of Akkadian receded before that of Aramaic with scarce a murmur of complaint. An officer in Ur does once ask permission to write to the king in Aramaic.³¹ But no pedantic or puristic murmur has yet been found in any Akkadian tablet. The closest we have is an exchange of correspondence between a scribe and King Sargon (721-705):

书记官：如果陛下允许，我将撰写一份（亚兰语）文件。

SCRIBE: If it please my Lord, I will write an [Aramaic] document.

萨尔贡：你为什么不写阿卡德语？³²

SARGON: Why do you not write Akkadian?³²

事实上，根据阿卡德语中从阿拉姆语借入的词汇模式，以及反向借词模式的证据，有人认为，在语言转变发生时，阿卡德语已不再是主流语言，使用阿卡德语的人本质上是用阿拉姆语思考的，同时努力（但失败了）试图将阿拉姆语动词从脑海中清除出去^。33

Indeed, on the evidence of the pattern of words borrowed in Akkadian from Aramaic, as against those borrowed in the reverse direction, it has been claimed that Akkadian, by the time the changeover was taking place, was the less favoured language, with those who wrote it essentially thinking in Aramaic, while struggling (and failing) to put their Aramaic verbs out of their minds.³³

阿拉姆语战胜阿卡德语，其成功应归因于实用性而非古代声望，而实用性主要源于其广泛的普及。其配套的书写系统更快捷简便，这无疑是锦上添花；如果说有什么影响的话，那就是消除了部分阿拉姆语使用者学习阿卡德语的一个障碍。毕竟，学习阿卡德语又有何意义呢？一个人永远无法被认可为非阿卡德语使用者；甚至连王室都在使用阿拉姆语。

The triumph of Aramaic over Akkadian must be ascribed as one of practical utility over ancient prestige, but the utility came primarily from the fact that so many people already spoke it. The fact that its associated writing system was quicker and easier was an added bonus; if anything, it just removed one argument that might have made sections of the Aramaic-speaking population want to learn Akkadian too. After all, what was the point? One would never be accepted as anything other than šaglūti; and even the royal court was taking up Aramaic.

就像苏美尔语曾经遭受的冲击一样，阿卡德语也成为了游牧民族和新来者带来的新语言的牺牲品；不稳定的双语现象随之而来，旧语言也随之消亡。

As once had Sumerian, so now Akkadian fell victim to a new language brought by nomads and newcomers; unstable bilingualism followed, together with the death of the older language.

在这样的时代，学习阿卡德语的唯一理由是为了维系与过去两千年文学的联系，以及与美索不达米亚伟大城市相关的辉煌传统。阿卡德语在巴比伦作为一种古典语言，在其可能消亡后的六百年间得以延续：不仅巴比伦最后一个王朝（公元前625-539年）——尽管其语言源于迦勒底语（即阿拉姆语）——仍用阿卡德语撰写其统治史，而且外族征服者，如波斯的居鲁士（公元前557-529年）和薛西斯（公元前485-465年），甚至希腊的安条克四世（公元前280-261年），都用这种皇家语言留下铭文，歌颂自己的统治。当一位希腊君主能够写下这样一段话时，无疑产生了一种新的，甚至可以说是野蛮的共鸣：“我是安条克，伟大的国王，合法的国王，世界之王，巴比伦之王，万国之王，埃萨吉拉神庙和埃齐达神庙的守护者，塞琉古的长子，马其顿人，巴比伦之王。” ³⁴

In such times, the only argument for an education in Akkadian was to maintain the link with the literature of the previous two thousand years, and the traditions of grandeur associated with the great cities of Mesopotamia. It lived on in Babylon as a classical language for six hundred years after its probable death: not only did the last dynasty of Babylon (625-539 BC) use it for chronicles of their rule, despite being of Chaldaean (i.e. Aramaic) extraction, but foreign conquerors, the Persians Cyrus (557-529 BC) and Xerxes (485-465 BC) and even the Greek Antiochus Soter (280-261 BC), all left inscriptions in the royal language glorifying their own reigns. There was certainly a new and, some would say, barbarous resonance when a Greek monarch could write: ‘I am An-ti- ’u-ku-us [Antiochus], the great king, the legitimate king, the king of the world, king of E [Babylon], king of all countries, the caretaker of the temples Esagila and Ezida, the first born of Si-lu-uk-ku [Seleucus], Ma-ak-ka-du-na-a-a [Macedonian], king of Babylon.’³⁴

但能听懂它们的人已经寥寥无几了^。

But there were few who could still understand them.^*

腓尼基人——没有文化的商业：

迦南及西部地区

Phoenician—commerce without culture:

Canaan, and points west

mī ə- ōr kə- umāh bə ō hayyām

mī ə-ōr kə-umāh bəō hayyām

曾有哪个城市像泰尔那样被大海环绕，最终陷入沉寂？^†

Who was ever silenced like Tyre, surrounded by the sea?^†

以西结书 27:32

Ezekiel xxvii.32

迦南姐妹从小一起长大，但后来走上了截然不同的人生道路。

The Canaan sisters grew up together, but then set out on very different paths in life.

菲尼西亚（并非她的真名，而是为了纪念她闻名遐迩的亮丽色彩而取的^*）选择了奢华的生活，与珠宝、华服和各种奢侈品紧密相连。她周游列国，在所有上流社会圈子中都声名鹊起，备受推崇，其高超的沟通技巧也广为流传。她身边聚集了当时最具创造力、最聪明、最富有的人士，并凭借其娴熟的待客之道，将他们彼此联系起来。她还有一个女儿，名叫艾丽莎，或许不如母亲那样才华横溢、多才多艺，但她建立了自己的家庭，并在菲尼西亚日渐衰弱时，继续拓展母亲的人脉网络。

Phoenicia (not her real name, but one that recalls the lustrous colour for which she was famous^*) chose the high life, and became associated with jewellery, fine clothing and every form of luxury. She travelled extensively, became known and admired in all the best social circles, and was widely imitated for her sophisticated skills in communication. She surrounded herself with all the most creative, intelligent and wealthy people of her era, and as a skilled hostess put them in contact with one another. She also had a daughter, Elissa, who was not perhaps as brilliant or as versatile as her mother, but who set up her own household, and went on to expand her mother’s network, when Phoenicia’s own energies were waning.

另一个妹妹朱迪思，年轻时默默无闻，或许名声不佳，但后来便安顿下来，过着平静的家庭生活。她从未离开过自己的街区，满足于操持家务。尽管她朴素无华，但许多人认为她过于自负，而且她经常受到当地恶霸的欺凌：有时她会在家中遭到袭击，被拖走时发出尖叫；最终，她彻底失去了家园。她所能做的，就是在被驱赶的任何地方努力求生，她意志坚定却不张扬，主要依靠的是她对曾经的家园的记忆，以及她坚定不移的宗教信仰。她没有自己的孩子，但偶尔会做寄养母亲，尽管被寄养的孩子很少感激她，也不忠诚，但她依然乐此不疲。

The other sister, Judith, had an obscure and perhaps disreputable youth, but then settled down to a quiet life at home. She never ventured outside her own neighbourhood, contenting herself with domestic duties. For all her homeliness, many thought she had far too high an opinion of herself, and she had considerable difficulties with local bullies: occasionally she was attacked in her own home and dragged off screaming; ultimately she lost her home altogether. All she could do was try to survive wherever she was led, in a dogged but non-assertive way, relying above all on her memories of her home as she had once kept it, and her unswerving religious devotion. She had no children of her own, but now and then she acted as a foster mother, undiscouraged though she received little gratitude or loyalty from her charges.

世界彻底改变了这对姐妹的命运。菲尼西亚曾拥有辉煌的事业、进取的精神和极高的人气，却突然销声匿迹，在她曾经频繁出入、令她光彩照人的人群中，她竟完全被遗忘。她的女儿虽然努力延续着她的记忆，但最终也好不到哪里去：她被对手重创，失去了所有的美貌和财富，最终憔悴而死。

The world reversed the fortunes of these two sisters. Despite Phoenicia’s glittering career, her enterprising nature and all her popularity, she quite suddenly disappeared, and among the people she had frequented, stimulated and dazzled for so long, she left no memory at all. Her daughter did perpetuate her memory, but in the end she did no better: she was mortally wounded by a rival, lost all her looks and wealth, and then wasted away to nothing.

如今，菲尼西亚和她的女儿仿佛从未存在过。然而，朱迪思依然与我们同在，她常常遭受嘲笑和羞辱——尤其是她的养子女，他们对她莫名地怀有怨恨——但她似乎依然坚强如初。就在不久前，她甚至回到了故居，似乎因此获得了新生。

Now it is as if Phoenicia and her daughter had never been. Yet Judith is still with us, often derided and dishonoured—especially by her foster children, who have been strangely resentful of her—but apparently as sturdy as ever. She has even, just recently, returned to her old home, and seems thereby to have gained a fresh lease of life.

这个小寓言揭示了迦南地各种语言命运中一种奇特的讽刺。希伯来语（常自称为[ yūdīth ]，意为“犹大之女”）和腓尼基语是古代迦南的两种语言，其他语言包括亚扪语、摩押语和以东语，它们通行于约旦河以东。此外，还有乌加里特语，通行于腓尼基以北的沿海地区。所有这些语言可能都起源于这一地区游牧部落的语言，即哈比鲁人（Habiru）。但其中一些人定居在黎巴嫩沿海。在公元前第一个千年，他们的贸易活动蓬勃发展，他们的语言腓尼基语也成为这些语言中最广泛使用的语言。相比之下，希伯来语和其他语言从未成为主要语言，它们仅限于迦南西南部地区，而且也仅限于公元前第一个千年的早期。公元前六世纪，由于犹太人被迫流亡巴比伦，希伯来语衰落，并可能最终消亡为一种方言，与此同时，阿拉米语在巴比伦帝国各地传播开来。

This little parable points out the strange irony in the fates of the languages of the land of Canaan. Hebrew (often self-named as [yūdīth], ‘she of Judah’) and Phoenician are two of the languages of ancient Canaan, the others being Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite, spoken east of the River Jordan. There was also Ugaritic, spoken on the coast north of Phoenicia. All may have begun as the languages of nomadic tribes in this area, marauding Habiru. But some settled on the coast of Lebanon. During the first millennium BC, their trading activities developed mightily, and their language, Phoenician, became much the most widely spoken of the group. Hebrew and the others, by contrast, never became major languages, being restricted to the south-west of Canaan, and that only in the first part of that millennium. In the sixth century BC, Hebrew was weakened, and probably finished as a vernacular, by virtue of the enforced exile of the Jews to Babylon, coinciding with the spread of Aramaic all over the Babylonian empire.

腓尼基语似乎在黎巴嫩沿海地区一直使用到公元前1世纪（之后被阿拉姆语取代），在北非至少使用到公元5世纪。但尽管希伯来语在此之前已停止使用数个世纪，犹太人将其作为犹太教圣语的书面和仪式用途却从未中断。这种隐秘的存在得益于学校的教学传统，以及对犹太教经典的持续阅读、阐释和抄写，而《圣经》的“旧约”只是其中很小的一部分^。

Phoenician appears to have gone on being spoken on the coast of Lebanon until the first century BC (where it was replaced by Aramaic), and in North Africa until at least the fifth century AD. But although Hebrew had ceased to be spoken many centuries before this, its written and ritual use by Jews as the sacred language of Judaism had never lapsed. This underground existence was protected by a tradition of teaching in schools, and persistent reading, exposition and copying of the Jewish texts, of which the Bible’s ‘Old Testament’ is quite a small part.^*

迦南语系语言是典型的闪米特语系语言。它们共同的一个显著特征是长音A倾向于圆唇化：例如，希伯来语的š'lōm对应阿拉伯语的salām，意为“和平”。在腓尼基语（以及布匿语）中，这种倾向更为显著，甚至短音A也圆唇化为ō，长音A则更加圆唇化为ū：因此，腓尼基语中“永恒”一词为'ūlōm（希伯来语为'ōlām，亚兰语为'āl'm），其最高行政长官的头衔为sūfet，相当于希伯来语šōpet，即旧约圣经中“法官”一词。由于腓尼基语的文字系统仅标记辅音，因此关于其元音的证据必然是间接的。

The Canaanite languages are very much typical Semitic languages. One distinctive property they all have in common is a tendency to round their long A sound: hence Hebrew š’lōm for Arabic salām, ‘peace’. In Phoenician (and Punic) this tendency goes farther, with even short A rounded to ō, and long A even more rounded to ū: so the Phoenician for eternity is ’ūlōm (versus Hebrew ’ōlām, Aramaic ’āl’m), and their chief magistrates hold the title sūfet, equivalent to Hebrew šōpet, the word for ‘judge’ in the Old Testament. The evidence for Phoenician vowels is necessarily indirect, since their writing system marked consonants only.

除了黎巴嫩的故乡之外，腓尼基铭文还发现于埃及、安纳托利亚南部、塞浦路斯、北非、马耳他、西西里岛、撒丁岛和西班牙南部。这些分布广泛的铭文大多使用与邻近的推罗和西顿城邦相关的腓尼基方言，而推罗通常被认为是腓尼基人在海外定居的母城。特别是，传说中腓尼基公主艾丽莎（或狄多）的故乡就在这里，据说她建立了迦太基（腓尼基语qart hadašt，意为“新城”）。许多铭文都是双语的，表明腓尼基人与卢维人、希腊人、塞浦路斯人以及最终的罗马人之间有着密切的联系。

Beyond its homeland in Lebanon, Phoenician inscriptions are found in Egypt, in southern Anatolia, in Cyprus, North Africa, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and the south of Spain. These far-flung inscriptions tend to be in the dialect of Phoenician associated with the neighbouring cities of Tyre and Sidon, and Tyre is usually quoted as the mother city of Phoenician settlements abroad. In particular, it is the legendary original home of Elissa, or Dido, the Phoenician princess who is said to have founded Carthage (Phoenician qart hadašt, ‘new city’). Many of the inscriptions are bilingual, showing active relations with Luwians, Greeks, Cypriots and ultimately Romans.

我们还读到过腓尼基的重要档案，最早的记录出现在公元前十一世纪的一则埃及故事中。故事讲述埃及代理人温阿蒙前往比布鲁斯订购木材，不得不与国王扎卡尔巴尔进行激烈的讨价还价。扎卡尔巴尔国王朗读了写在莎草纸卷轴上的前代交易的先例。泰尔城也保存着记录，因为约瑟夫斯记载，希腊历史学家以弗所的米南德曾根据这些记录编纂了泰尔史。

We also read of major Phoenician archives, the earliest being in an Egyptian tale of the eleventh century BC, where an Egyptian agent, Wen-Amun, goes to Byblos to order timber, and has to bargain aggressively with King Zakar-baal, who reads out the precedents from deals in earlier generations, written on rolls of papyrus. The city of Tyre also kept records, since Josephus records that the Greek historian Menander of Ephesus had compiled his history of Tyre from them.

巧合的是，现存最早的腓尼基语铭文是比布鲁斯国王阿希兰的墓志铭。根据其语言推断，该铭文的年代可追溯至公元前十一世纪。

As it happens, the earliest inscription in Phoenician is the epitaph of Ahiram, king of Byblos. It is dated (by its language) to the eleventh century BC.

这是比布鲁斯国王阿希兰之子伊托巴尔为他的父亲阿希兰打造的棺材，用来安葬他的父亲，使他进入永恒的殿堂。

Coffin which Ittobaal, son of Ahiram, king of Byblos, made for Ahiram his father, when he placed him in the house of eternity.

如今，若有君王、总督或军队统帅胆敢攻打比布鲁斯，揭开这口棺椁，愿他的权杖被夺走，他的王座被推翻，和平从此远离比布鲁斯！至于他，愿他的铭文被抹去……

Now if a king among kings or a governor among governors or a commander of an army should come up against Byblos and uncover this coffin, may the sceptre of his rule be torn away, may the throne of his kingdom be overturned, and may peace flee from Byblos! And as for him, may his inscription be effaced …

尽管腓尼基拥有长达千年的文字记载历史，但至今仍未发现任何腓尼基语的艺术文献。然而，1929年的一项发现揭示了位于其正北方邻城乌加里特的古代文献，其年代可追溯至公元前14至13世纪。^*这里记载的神话和史诗中的核心人物是腓尼基城邦崇拜中地位显赫的神祇，尤其是哈达德或巴力（意为“主”），他的父亲达贡，一位拥有众多名字的美丽女神（包括阿什托雷特和阿舍拉），仁慈的至高神埃尔，以及神圣的工匠和铁匠科塔尔。一千三百年后，腓尼基语已基本消亡，比布鲁斯的菲洛用希腊语撰写了《腓尼基史》，声称其源自贝鲁特的桑丘尼亚顿的作品，而桑丘尼亚顿本人则是在阿蒙神庙的柱子（巴力·阿蒙神庙的石柱）上读到过此书。菲洛沿袭了古代的惯例，将许多腓尼基神祇的名字（与那些流传着类似故事的神祇）与希腊名字混淆，因此，他对腓尼基神话的描述缺乏佐证，在近两千年的时间里，人们对此持怀疑态度。但菲洛确实提到埃尔是克洛诺斯的名字，并称达贡是克洛诺斯的儿子。达贡后来生下了身份不明的^德玛鲁斯，经过一番波折，德玛鲁斯、阿斯塔特（又名阿斯忒里亚）和阿多多斯最终在埃尔的统治下成为世界的统治者。库索尔是工匠之神，在世界的创造和发明起源中扮演着重要角色。由于阿斯塔特和阿斯忒里亚很可能是阿什托雷特和阿舍拉的希腊语音译，而去掉希腊语词尾-os的阿多多斯（其O发音较长）自然而然地就是哈达德的腓尼基语发音，因此腓尼基神祇的基本构成已经确定。

For all its thousand years of recorded history, there is no surviving artistic literature in Phoenician. However, a discovery in 1929 revealed an ancient literature in the neighbouring city directly to the north, Ugarit, dated to the fourteenth or thirteenth century BC^* The central characters in the myths and epics recorded here are gods known to have loomed large in the cults in Phoenician cities, especially Hadad or Baal (which means simply ‘the Lord’), his father Dagon, a beautiful consort goddess who has various names, including Ashtoreth and Asherah, El, the benign high god, and Kothar, the divine craftsman and smith. Thirteen hundred years later, after Phoenician had largely died out as a language, one Philo of Byblos wrote in Greek a Phoenician History, claiming that it was derived from the work of Sanchuniathon of Beirut, who had himself read it on ammouneis, the pillars of Baal Ammon that stood in Phoenician temples. Since Philo, in typical ancient fashion, identifies many of the Phoenician gods by Greek names (of those of whom similar tales were told), his unsupported account of Phoenician mythology was received (for almost two thousand years) with some scepticism. But Philo does in fact mention El as the name of Kronos,^† and makes Dagon his son. Dagon later fathers an unknown Dēmarūs, and after much action Demarus, Astartē (aka Asteria) and Adōdos end up as governors of the world, under El’s direction. Khusor is the craftsman god, important in the creation of the world and the origin of inventions. Since Astarte and Asteria are plausible Greek transliterations of Ashtoreth and Asherah, and Adōdos without its Greek ending -os would (with its long O) be a natural Phoenician pronunciation of Hadad, the basic cast of Phoenician gods is in place.

乌加里特文献也让我们得以窥见希伯来文学与已佚失的腓尼基作品之间的密切联系。请记住，希伯来语与乌加里特语关系密切，但不如腓尼基语那么密切。现在请思考一下，乌加里特女神阿纳特是如何装扮自己去迎接巴力的使者的：

The Ugaritic texts also give us a hint of how close Hebrew literature comes to the missing Phoenician works. Remember that Hebrew is a close relative of Ugaritic, but not as close as Phoenician. Now consider how the goddess Anath of Ugarit decks herself out to meet the emissaries of Baal:

她打了些水，然后洗澡；

She draws some water and bathes;

大地肥沃的露珠，

Sky-dew of the fatness of earth,

云骑士的喷雾；

Spray of the Rider of the Clouds;

天降的露水

Dew that the heavens do shed

星星洒下的水雾^。35

Spray that is shed by the stars.³⁵

“大地肥沃的天露”一词的希伯来文是l šmm šmn 'r 。这正是以撒在创世记祝福场景中向雅各所应许的（却拒绝向以扫应许的）：

The words for ‘Sky-dew of the fatness of earth’ are l šmm šmn ’r. This is precisely what Isaac promises to Jacob (and denies to Esau) in the blessing scene in Genesis:

愿上帝赐予你天上的甘露和地上的肥沃^。36

May God give you of dew of heaven and of fatness of earth³⁶

（当然，传统上希伯来语拼写只标记辅音以及一些长元音。）

(Traditionally, of course, Hebrew spelling too marked only consonants, as well as some long vowels.)

希伯来语和乌加里特语非常接近，以至于它们共享一些固定的短语。将乌加里特史诗中的人物角色与旧约圣经的措辞以及斐洛的《桑丘尼亚顿腓尼基史》的叙述结合起来，我们或许能够重构比布鲁斯、推罗及其姊妹城市的语言文化。

Hebrew and Ugaritic were close enough, then, to share some fixed phrases. Combining the dramatis personae of the Ugaritic epics with the phraseology of the Old Testament, and the narratives of Philo’s Phoenician History of Sanchuniathon, we may be able to reconstruct something of the verbal culture of Byblos, Tyre and their sister cities.

在以西结书的一段著名经文中，可以清晰地感受到推罗诗歌的风格。在预言犹大邻国衰落的一系列预言中，先知提到了一座他预见将要毁灭的城市——推罗——昔日的辉煌：“推罗啊，你说：‘我美丽完美。’”

There is a clear echo of what Tyrian poetry may have been like in a famous passage of Ezekiel. In the course of a series of prophecies of the downfall of Judah’s various neighbours, the prophet digresses on the past glories of one city for which he foresees destruction: You say, O Tyre, ‘I am perfect in beauty.’

你的领地位于公海上；

Your domain was on the high seas;

你们的建筑工人将你们的美丽家园打造得完美无瑕。

your builders brought your beauty to perfection.

他们用塞尼尔的松木制作了你们所有的木材；

They made all your timbers of pine trees from Senir;

他们从黎巴嫩运来一棵雪松，为你做了一根桅杆。

they took a cedar from Lebanon and made a mast for you.

他们用巴珊的橡树做了你们的桨；

Of oaks from Bashan they made your oars;

来自塞浦路斯海岸的柏木

of cypress wood from the coasts of Cyprus

他们用象牙镶嵌了你的甲板。

they made your deck, inlaid with ivory.

你的帆是用埃及精美的刺绣亚麻布制成的。

Fine embroidered linen from Egypt was your sail

并充当了你的旗帜；

and served as your banner;

你的遮阳篷是蓝紫色的。

your awnings were of blue and purple

与以利沙的海岸相连。

with the coasts of Elishah.

你们的桨手是西顿人和阿尔瓦德人；

Men of Sidon and Arwad were your oarsmen;

泰尔啊，你那些技艺精湛的船员都在船上，他们是你的水手。

your skilled men, O Tyre, were aboard as your seamen.

比布鲁斯的资深工匠们都在船上。

Veteran craftsmen of Byblos were on board

就像造船工匠一样，帮你填补接缝。

as shipwrights to caulk your seams.

海上所有的船只和水手

All the ships of the sea and their sailors

过来和你交换货物。

came alongside to trade for your wares.

波斯人、吕底亚人和普特人

Men of Persia, Lydia, and Put

曾在你们军队中担任士兵。

served as soldiers in your army.

他们把盾牌和头盔挂在了你的墙上，

They hung their shields and helmets on your walls,

为您带来辉煌。

bringing you splendour.

阿尔瓦德和赫勒克的士兵从四面八方守卫着你的城墙；

Men of Arwad and Helech manned your walls on every side;

伽玛德人曾攻入你们的塔楼。

men of Gammad were in your towers.

他们把盾牌挂在你的城墙上；

They hung their shields around your walls;

他们让你的美丽臻于完美。

they brought your beauty to perfection.

… ^*

…^*

他施的船只为你们运送货物。

The ships of Tarshish serve as carriers for your wares.

你满载着沉重的货物

You are filled with heavy cargo

在海洋的中心。

in the heart of the sea.

你的划桨手将带你出海远航。

Your oarsmen will take you out to the high seas.

但东风会把你吹得粉碎。

But the east wind will break you to pieces

在海洋的中心。

in the heart of the sea.

…

当他们为你哀嚎痛哭时

As they wail and mourn over you

他们会为你哀悼：

they will take up a lament concerning you:

“谁曾像泰尔那样被噤声？”

’Who was ever silenced like Tyre,

被大海环绕？³⁷

surrounded by the sea?’³⁷

迦太基人和其他腓尼基人一样，保存了大量的记录。那些原本保存在纸莎草上的记录已经遗失，但现存数千条铭文，内容包括分配祭祀供品的权利、向女神坦克或神巴力·哈蒙献祭，以及纪念各种仪式。此外，迦太基显然将其语言的行政使用权传给了西部的邻邦马西利亚和马萨西利亚：他们的钱币和界碑上都刻有布匿文字^。38

The Carthaginians, like other Phoenicians, kept voluminous records. Those that would have been kept on papyrus are lost, but there are several thousand known inscriptions, assigning rights over sacrificial offerings, making dedications to the goddess Tank or the god Baal Hammon, or commemorating ceremonies. It is also clear that Carthage had passed on the administrative use of its language to the neighbouring states to the west, Massylia and Massaesylia: their coins bear inscriptions in Punic letters, as do boundary stones.³⁸

事实上，有证据表明迦太基语中存在着完整的文学体系。圣奥古斯丁曾说过一句名言：“许多学者都认为，迦太基书籍中蕴含着大量的德行和智慧。” ³⁹罗马元老院也持有这种观点。公元前146年，迦太基城最终被摧毁之际，元老院下令重新翻译并出版一部备受推崇的农业论著。“我们的元老院将城中的图书馆赠予非洲诸侯，唯独马戈的28卷书例外，他们下令将其翻译成拉丁文……这部著作的文本委托给了精通迦太基语的学者。” ⁴⁰后世的拉丁作家引用了其中约四十个片段，但这部著作的全集，即使是拉丁文译本，也已失传。

Indeed, there is evidence for a whole literature in Punic. St Augustine remarked famously that ‘on the word of many scholars, there was a great deal of virtue and wisdom in the Punic books’.³⁹ This view was shared by the Roman Senate, which even as the city of Carthage was being finally destroyed in 146 BC gave orders for a new translation and edition of one especially admired treatise on agriculture. ‘Our Senate presented the libraries of the city to African princes, with the sole exception of the 28 books of Mago, which they decreed should be translated into Latin … The text was entrusted to scholars learned in Punic.’⁴⁰ Some forty fragments of it are quoted by later Latin authors, but the work as a whole is lost, even in Latin translation.

事实上，没有任何布匿语文学作品流传至今。最接近的，是迦太基巴力哈蒙神庙中一块布匿语铭文的希腊语译本，约七百字。铭文记录了迦太基领袖汉诺绕非洲西海岸（或许远至加蓬）的探险之旅。译文结尾如下：

In fact, no Punic literary work has survived. The closest to it is a Greek translation, in about seven hundred words, of a Punic inscription engraved in the temple of Baal Hammon at Carthage, recording the voyage of exploration by a Carthaginian leader, Hanno, round the western coast of Africa (perhaps as far as Gabon). It ends:

……我们来到了名为南方之角的海湾。海湾一角有一座岛屿……岛上有一个湖泊，湖中居住着一群野蛮人。她们绝大多数是女性，浑身长满毛发，翻译称她们为“大猩猩”。我们无法抓住那些男性，因为他们擅长攀爬，而且会用石头自卫。但我们抓住了三个女人，她们奋力反抗，撕咬我们。然而，我们最终还是杀死了她们，剥了皮，把兽皮带回了迦太基。由于补给耗尽，我们没有继续航行^。41

… we came to the gulf named Horn of the South. In the corner was an island … and in it a lake with an island full of savage people. By far the majority of them were female, hairy in body, called by the interpreters ‘gorillas’. We could not catch the men because of their skill at climbing and defending themselves with stones, but we took three women, who fiercely resisted, biting and tearing. However, we killed them and skinned them, and brought the hides back to Carthage. We did not sail further since our supplies had given out.⁴¹

令人着迷的是，这篇文字是布匿文学残存下来的少数几篇简短文献之一，它竟然讲述了这样一段独特的冒险故事。

It is tantalising that this text, one of the few brief survivals from the wreck of Punic literature, should have recounted such a unique adventure.

腓尼基语及其后继方言布匿语在地中海世界如此广泛扩张之后，为何会彻底消失？这又是一个尚未解答，也鲜有人提出的问题。

How is the total loss of Phoenician, and its successor dialect Punic, to be explained, after such a widespread expansion across the Mediterranean world? We have here another unanswered, and as yet largely unasked, question.

公元前332年亚历山大攻陷泰尔之后，腓尼基的贸易在接下来的几个世纪里依然繁荣昌盛，没有再发生任何危及商人稳定的灾难。即使在公元前二世纪末与迦太基失去所有行政联系的海外行省，布匿语也没有立即消亡：例如，在撒丁岛就发现了数处“新布匿语”铭文，其中最新的一处位于最南端的比西亚，其年代可追溯至公元二世纪末。尽管迦太基城在公元前146年遭受了残酷的毁灭，但一个世纪后，奥古斯都将其重建为一座罗马城市。此后，迦太基一直繁荣发展，直至西罗马帝国灭亡。我们可以推测，这种语言在北非一直沿用到公元五世纪：奥古斯丁告诉我们，他不得不以拉丁语引用布匿谚语，因为“并非所有人”都能理解原文^。42

After Alexander’s sack of Tyre in 332 BC, Phoenician trade remained prosperous for many centuries, with no further disasters to threaten the traders’ stability. The Punic language did not die out promptly, even in its overseas provinces, where all the administrative links to Carthage were cut by the end of the second century BC: in Sardinia, for example, several ‘neo-Punic’ inscriptions have been found, the latest, at Bithia in the extreme south, made as late as the end of the second century AD. And even if the life of Carthage as a city was brutally punctuated in 146 BC, it was refounded as a Roman town by Augustus a century later. It then enjoyed a flourishing later life till the end of the Roman empire in the west. We may surmise that its language survived in use in North Africa, until the fifth century AD: Augustine tells us that he had to quote his Punic proverbs in Latin since ‘not everybody’ would understand the original.⁴²

然而，自从亚历山大征服西亚以来，近东地区普遍呈现出文化趋同的趋势，希腊语和阿拉姆语迅速传播，其他少数民族语言则逐渐式微。尽管阿拉姆语与腓尼基语或希伯来语密切相关，但在这一时期，希腊语仍然被犹太社群（尤其是埃及的犹太社群）广泛使用。希腊语也成为罗马教育的基础科目，到公元前二世纪，罗马已然成为公认的新兴强国。

Nevertheless, ever since Alexander’s conquest of western Asia there had been a general cultural levelling in the Near East, with Greek and Aramaic spreading at the expense of all the minority languages. Although Aramaic was a language closely related to Phoenician or Hebrew, Greek had still been taken up by a large part of the Jewish community (especially those in Egypt) in this period. Greek had also become a basic subject in the education of Romans, who were by the second century BC clearly recognised as the rising power.

因此，文化潮流强烈倾向于希腊语。事实上，尽管腓尼基语或迦太基语的使用者拥有卓越的商业才能，但它们可能从未在非洲以外广泛用作通用语，甚至从未用作贸易术语。毕竟，贸易语言必然是顾客的语言，而不是商人的语言。

The cultural undertow was thus running strongly in favour of Greek. And in fact it is possible that, despite its users’ commercial prowess, Phoenician or Punic had never been widely used as a lingua franca or even as a trade jargon outside Africa. The language of trade is, after all, perforce that of the customer, rather than that of the merchant.

罗马喜剧作家普劳图斯在他的剧作《布匿人》（Poenulus ）中对此有所阐述。该剧创作于公元前二世纪初，即第二次布匿战争结束后不久。剧中^，一位迦太基商人试图用布匿语与两位罗马人交谈，尽管他懂拉丁语，但很快就厌倦了他们不断拿他和他的语言开的玩笑和双关语，这些玩笑和双关语是为了掩盖其中一位自称略懂布匿语的人糟糕的语言能力。（汉诺的布匿语用粗体标出，与之呼应的拉丁语用粗斜体标出。）

The Roman comedian Plautus illustrates this in a scene from his play Poenulus, ‘the Punic guy’—’Punk’?—which came out in the early second century BC, soon after the end of the Second Punic War.⁴³ A Carthaginian merchant tries talking to a couple of Romans in Punic, even though he knows Latin, but soon tires of their constant heavy puns and jokes on him and his language, to cloak the poor language skills of the one who claims to be a bit of Punic expert. (Hanno’s Punic is in bold, and the Latin that echoes it is in bold italics.)

HANNO：mechar bocca MILPHIO：Istuc tibi sat potius quam mihi。阿戈拉斯托克勒斯：什么？米尔菲奥：miseram esse praedicat buccam sibi。医疗堡垒是仲裁者。

HANNO: mechar bocca MILPHIO: Istuc tibi sit potius quam mihi. AGORASTOCLES: quid ait? MILPHIO: miseram esse praedicat buccam sibi. fortasse medicos nos esse arbitrarier.

AGORASTOCLES：si ita est nega esse； nolo ego errare 医院。

AGORASTOCLES: si ita est nega esse; nolo ego errare hospitem.

米尔菲奥：你吗？汉诺：rufe ynny cho 是山姆

MILPHIO: audin tu? HANNO: rufe ynny cho is sam

AGORASTOCLES：sicvolo profecto vera cuncta huic expedirier。 Rega numquid opu' 坐。米尔菲奥：tu qui sonam non habes，quid in hanc venistis urbem aut quid quaeritis？

AGORASTOCLES: sic volo profecto vera cuncta huic expedirier. roga numquid opu’ sit. MILPHIO: tu qui sonam non habes, quid in hanc venistis urbem aut quid quaeritis?

汉诺：muphursa阿戈拉斯托克勒斯：什么？

HANNO: muphursa AGORASTOCLES: quid ait?

HANNO：mi uulech ianna

HANNO: mi uulech ianna

AGORASTOCLES: quid venit?

米尔菲奥：不是奥迪？mures africanos praedicat in pompam ludis敢于se velle aedilibus。

MILPHIO: non audis? mures Africanos praedicat in pompam ludis dare se velle aedilibus.

汉诺：早上好。米尔菲奥：幸好不是我。

HANNO: Good morning to you. MILPHIO: Better you than me.

阿戈拉斯托克勒斯：他在说什么？米尔菲奥：他说他下巴疼。

AGORASTOCLES: What is he saying? MILPHIO: He says his jaw hurts.

或许他以为我们是医生。

Perhaps he thinks we are doctors.

阿戈拉斯托克勒斯：那就说我们不是；作为一个陌生人，我不想误导他。

AGORASTOCLES: Then say we’re not; as a stranger, I don’t want him misled.

米尔菲奥：你在听吗？汉诺：医生，没有人是完美的。

MILPHIO: Are you listening? HANNO: Doctor, no one is perfect.

阿戈拉斯托克勒斯：是的，我当然希望有人能给我解释清楚这一切。问问他是否需要什么。米尔菲奥：你没系腰带，你们这些人来这座城市做什么？你们究竟想要什么？

AGORASTOCLES: Yes, I certainly want all this explained to me. Ask him if he needs anything. MILPHIO: YOU without a belt, why have you people come to this city, or what are you after?

汉诺：你什么意思？阿戈拉斯托克勒斯：他在说什么？

HANNO: What do you mean? AGORASTOCLES: What is he saying?

汉诺：他跟一个陌生人说了些什么？

HANNO: What is he on about to a stranger?

阿戈拉斯托克勒斯：他为什么来了？

AGORASTOCLES: Why has he come?

米尔菲奥：你没听到吗？他说他想把非洲老鼠（这是在开玩笑，指“大象”）送给市政官员，让他们在马戏团游行中表演^。44

MILPHIO: Don’t you hear? African mice [a joke for ‘elephants’?] he says he wants to present to the city wardens for the circus parade.⁴⁴

不过，书中出现布匿语对话这一事实表明，当时的罗马人对一些布匿语并不陌生，而且觉得这很有趣。

Still, the fact that the Punic dialogue is in there at all suggests that a smattering of Punic was not strange to Romans at the time, and good for a laugh.

据说迦太基军队（主要由来自西地中海各地的雇佣兵组成）的指挥语言是希腊语；可以肯定的是，公元前241年至238年那场被称为“无休止战争”的大叛乱期间，士兵们铸造的硬币上刻有希腊文。而且，据记载，随汉尼拔征战意大利的史学家西勒诺斯和索西洛斯也是用希腊语写作的。当汉尼拔在西西里岛的赫拉神庙里竖立一块牌匾，记录他的功绩时，牌匾上的文字既有希腊语，也有迦太基语。 ⁴⁵

The Carthaginian army (largely made up of mercenaries from all over the western Mediterranean) is said to have been commanded in Greek; certainly the coins struck by the soldiers during the great mutiny in 241-238 BC, the so-called ‘Truceless War’, were inscribed in Greek. And it is known that the annalists who accompanied Hannibal on campaign in Italy, Silenos and Sosylos, wrote in Greek. When Hannibal put up a plaque recording his exploits in a temple of Hera in Sicily, it was in Greek as well as Punic.⁴⁵

腓尼基人和迦太基人以精明的商人著称，他们必然也是实用主义者；与现代人一样，他们会注重沟通工具的实用性，并据此选择语言。在公元前最后几个世纪，很明显，地中海地区最通用的国际语言是希腊语。

The Phoenicians and Carthaginians, notorious as shrewd businessmen, must have been pragmatists; like their modern analogues, they would have focused on the practical utility of a means of communication, and chosen a language accordingly. In the last couple of centuries BC, it was clear that the most generally useful international language in the Mediterranean was Greek.

在迦太基城内，以及北非的利比亚（东部）和努米底亚（西部）行省，迦太基语仍然继续使用。但罗马征服（公元前146年）之后，没有证据表明迦太基语的文学活动仍在进行。识字似乎仅限于拉丁语和希腊语。迦太基的文化传统不再得到传承，这个曾经高度文明的社会留下的物质记录也未能长久保存。

In Carthage itself, and the North African provinces of Libya (to the east) and Numidia (to the west), Punic did continue to be used. But there is no evidence of Punic literary activity after the Roman conquest (146 BC). Literacy seems to have become restricted to the use of Latin and Greek. The Punic cultural traditions ceased to be fostered, and the physical record of this once highly literate society did not last much longer.

纸莎草纸曾是行政和文学记录的通用载体，这种材料只有在极其干燥的环境下（例如埃及沙漠）才能长期保存。如果文本没有刻写在石头、象牙或黏土等耐用载体上，除非反复抄写，否则就会消亡——在古典时代晚期和中世纪，希腊语、拉丁语乃至希伯来语的重要文献都一直沿用着这种抄写方式，直到印刷术的出现才使它们得以保存。腓尼基语和迦太基语文献没有保存的传统，因此它们随着书写它们的纸莎草纸一起消亡了。

The universal medium for administrative and literary records had been papyrus, a material that survives long-term only in extremely dry conditions (such as those of the Egyptian desert). Texts that were not inscribed on a durable medium such as stone, ivory or clay would not survive unless they were repeatedly copied—a service that was maintained for seminal texts in Greek and Latin, and indeed Hebrew, throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages, until the printing press made them safe. There was no tradition to preserve Phoenician or Punic texts, and so they perished with the papyrus on which they had been written.

^{至于口语方言，它们很可能一直延续到被规模更大的邻近语言所取代为止。有趣的是，在这两种情况下，这些新出现的语言都是闪米特语，与迦南方言密切相关，实际上与迦南方言非常相似。}黎巴嫩的腓尼基语在公元前1世纪被阿拉姆语取代；而北非的布匿语残余可能在公元7世纪甚至8世纪被阿拉伯语取代。

As for the spoken dialects, they will most likely have survived until succeeded by larger-scale neighbouring languages. Interestingly, in both cases, these new languages were Semitic, closely related to Canaanite dialects and in fact rather similar to them. Phoenician in the Lebanon will have yielded to Aramaic in the first century BC; and the last remnants of Punic in North Africa probably succumbed to Arabic in the seventh or even eighth century AD.^*

阿拉姆语——沙漠之歌：西亚的通用语

Aramaic—the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia

希西家王在位第十四年，亚述王西拿基立攻打犹大所有的坚固城邑，并将它们全部攻占。之后，他派遣他的统帅率领一支大军从拉吉来到耶路撒冷，觐见希西家王……统帅对希西家的使者以利亚敬、示巴那和约亚说：“

伟大的亚述王如此说：你们凭什么如此自信？……耶和华亲自吩咐我攻打这地，毁灭它。”

In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah’s reign, Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. Then he sent his field commander with a large army from Lachish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem … The field commander said to [Eliakim, Shebna and Joah, Hezekiah’s emissaries]:

This is what the great king, the king of Assyria says: on what are you basing this confidence of yours? … Yahweh himself told me to march against this country and destroy it.

于是以利亚敬、示巴拿和若亚对野战指挥官说：“大人，

请用亚兰语[ 'arāmīth ]和我们说话，因为我们听得懂。不要在城墙上的人听见的时候用希伯来语[ y ūdīth ]和我们说话。”

Then Eliakim, Shebna and Joan said to the field commander,

Please speak to us in Aramaic [’arāmīth], sir, since we understand it. Don’t speak to us in Hebrew [yūdīth] in the hearing of the people on the wall.

但指挥官回答说：

难道我的主人只派我来对你们和你们说这些话，而不对那些坐在城墙上的人说吗？他们和你们一样，将来也要吃自己的粪便，喝自己的尿液。

But the commander replied:

Was it only to your master and you that my master sent me to say these things, and not to the men sitting on the wall—who like you will have to eat their own shit and drink their own piss?

于是，统帅站起来，用希伯来语喊道：“

听听伟大的亚述王的话！王这样说：不要让希西家欺骗你们。他救不了你们！……”

Then the commander stood and called out in Hebrew:

Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria! This is what the king says: do not let Hezekiah deceive you. He cannot deliver you!…

以赛亚书 36:1-14（= 列王纪下 18:17-29）

Isaiah xxxvi.1-14 (= 2 Kings xviii.17-29)

这些发生在公元前 701 年的事件表明，在当时，阿拉姆语虽然是亚述帝国和犹大王国高级官员的通用语，但并不是犹大普通士兵的语言。

These events, which took place in 701 BC, show that at this stage Aramaic, although the lingua franca of senior officers in the Assyrian empire and the kingdom of Judah, was not the language of Judah’s common soldier.

这种情况后来发生了改变。亚述人彻底推行的内部驱逐政策被他们的继任者延续了下来，这一次，希伯来语以及犹大地区的许多希伯来语使用者成为了明显的受害者。

This was to change. The policy of internal deportation so thoroughly applied by the Assyrians was continued by their successors, and this time a notable victim was the Hebrew language, along with many of its speakers in the land of Judah.

公元前609年，亚述最终被东部的米底人和南部的巴比伦人组成的联盟征服。除了阿卡德语在亚述不再使用之外，语言上并没有直接受到影响。阿拉米语继续作为美索不达米亚的标准口语，而美索不达米亚此后（如果说还有统治权的话）则由巴比伦统治。但其他国家已经注意到了这一重大的政治变革。特别是埃及，看到了机会，入侵了巴勒斯坦和叙利亚。

When in 609 BC Assyria was at last subjugated by an alliance of Medes from the east and Babylonians from the south, there were no direct linguistic effects, except that Akkadian ceased to be written in Assyria. Aramaic continued as the standard spoken language of Mesopotamia, which was henceforth governed (if at all) from Babylon. But others had noticed the momentous political change. Egypt, in particular, saw an opportunity and invaded Palestine and Syria.

巴比伦王储尼布甲尼撒（Nabū-kudurri-u ur，意为“纳布，保护我的子孙”）做出了有效的回应。二十年后，在击退了这次以及可能另外两次埃及入侵之后，曾两次与埃及结盟的耶路撒冷彻底落入了巴比伦之手。城中大部分居民要么沦为难民逃往埃及，要么被流放到巴比伦。

Babylon’s crown prince Nebuchadrezzar (Nabū-kudurri-uur, ‘Nabŭ, protect my offspring’) responded effectively. Twenty years later, by the time this and perhaps two more Egyptian invasions had been repulsed, Jerusalem, which had twice sided with the Egyptians, was definitively in Babylonian hands. Most of its population went either as refugees to Egypt or as deportees to Babylon.

这正是扼杀一种语言的手段，十九世纪和二十世纪众多土著居民的经历便可证明这一点。他们被殖民者或社会改造者驱逐出家园，这些地区遍布北卡罗来纳州、昆士兰州、埃塞俄比亚、西伯利亚和西藏等地。希伯来语中流传着许多哀歌，深切地意识到这种危险：

This is precisely the sort of treatment that kills off a language, as can be attested by the experience of so many indigenous people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moved off their lands by colonists or social engineers, in regions as varied as North Carolina, Queensland, Ethiopia, Siberia and Tibet. There are Hebrew songs of lamentation, all too conscious of the danger:

'al naharō bābel šām yašbenō gam ba înŭ bəzā rēnŭ ě îôn …

’al naharō bābel šām yašbenō gam baînŭ bəzārēnŭ ě îôn …

我们坐在巴比伦的河边，

一想到锡安就哭了。

我们在那里把琴挂在白杨树上，

因为掳掠我们的人要我们唱歌，

折磨我们的人要我们唱喜乐的歌。

他们说：“给我们唱一首锡安的歌吧！”我们在异乡

怎能唱耶和华的歌呢？耶路撒冷啊，我若忘记你，情愿我的右手忘记技巧！我若不记念你，情愿我的舌头贴于上颚！

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

when we remembered Zion.

There on the poplars we hung our harps

for there our captors asked us for songs,

our tormentors asked for songs of joy;

They said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’

How can we sing the songs of Yahweh

while in a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

may my right hand forget its skill.

May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth

if I do not remember you …

诗篇137篇1-6节

Psalm cxxxvii. 1-6

然而，他们确实遗忘了，至少遗忘了耶路撒冷的语言。在巴比伦熙熙攘攘的人群中，曾经是犹太精英阶层通用的阿拉姆语变成了他们的母语，而作为平民语言的希伯来语则变成了只有学者才懂的语言。两代人之后，希伯来语便彻底从人们的口语中消失了。公元前538年，波斯国王居鲁士征服巴比伦后，在其首批改革措施之一中，允许犹太人返回耶路撒冷^。

Yet they did forget, at least the speech of Jerusalem. Amid the crowds of Babylon, Aramaic, which had been the cosmopolitan language for the Jewish elite, became their vernacular, and Hebrew, the language of the people, became a tongue known only to the learned. It had already vanished from speech two generations later, when in 538 the Persian king Cyrus, in one of his first reforms after conquering Babylon, allowed the Jews to return.^*

阿拉姆语如今已与巴比伦帝国密不可分，一种新的标准阿拉姆语版本应运而生，通常被称为帝国阿拉姆语。它起源于美索不达米亚东部地区，那里是阿拉姆人定居的地方。因此，帝国阿拉姆语受阿卡德语的影响比其更古老、一些人认为也更正宗的版本（即在阿拉姆和叙利亚其他地区使用的版本）更大。然而，这种方言注定不仅成为巴比伦帝国的标准语，也成为取代它的幅员辽阔的波斯帝国的标准语。正如《以斯帖记》中令人敬畏的描述，波斯帝国疆域辽阔，从荷都延伸到库什，即从印度斯坦延伸到埃及以南的库什地，拥有“超过127个省”。

The Aramaic language was now inseparable from the Babylonian empire, and a new standard version of the language arose, usually known as Imperial Aramaic. It had developed in the eastern areas, where the Aramaean settlers had established themselves in Mesopotamia, and as such was more influenced by Akkadian than its more ancient, and some would say more authentic, version spoken in Aram and the rest of Syria. Yet this dialect was destined to become the standard not just for the Babylonian empire, but for the much greater Persian empire that replaced it, ‘over 127 provinces stretching from Hōdŭ to Kŭš’, in the awed phrase of the Book of Esther, i.e. from Hindustan to the land of Kush, south of Egypt.

这种方言的独特之处在于一些细微之处，例如复数形式-îm被-în取代，复数形式-ayyā被-ē取代，以及某些动词形式中词首 h 的省略，取而代之的是喉塞音 '（颇似伦敦口语英语）。事实上，这种标准语的范本似乎是受过教育的波斯人所使用的巴比伦阿拉姆语。 ⁴⁶这种殖民移植语最终成为有效的标准语，其重要性丝毫不亚于通用美式英语如今作为世界英语标准的流行。作为“标准文学阿拉姆语”，它在接下来的千年里基本保持不变。

The distinctive traits of this dialect were fairly small things, such as plural-îm replaced by -în, plural -ayyā by -ē, and in some forms of the verb the dropping of initial h, to be replaced by a glottal stop ’ (rather reminiscent of colloquial London English). In fact, the model for this standard seems to have been Babylonian Aramaic as spoken and written by educated Persians.⁴⁶ The fact of this colonial transplant becoming the effective standard is no more surprising than the current popularity of General American as a world standard for English. As ‘Standard Literary Aramaic’ it was to remain essentially unchanged for the next millennium.

更令人惊讶的是，阿拉姆语也曾被用作国际交流的语言。在埃及首都孟菲斯附近的萨卡拉，人们发现了一份公元前七世纪晚期非利士国王的纸莎草纸，上面用阿拉姆语请求埃及法老帮助对抗巴比伦王；不久之后，在巴比伦攻陷耶路撒冷之前，犹大诸王的顾问耶利米在用希伯来语发表一番慷慨激昂的演说时，突然插入了一句阿拉姆语。这句口号是为了向外国的偶像崇拜者发出怒吼：

More surprisingly, Aramaic was also used to an extent as a language for international communication. At Saqqara, near the site of the Egyptian capital Memphis, a late seventh-century papyrus from a Philistine king has been discovered, asking in Aramaic for the Egyptian pharaoh’s help against the king of Babylon; soon afterwards, Jeremiah, an adviser to the kings of Judah just before Babylon sacked Jerusalem, breaks into Aramaic in the midst of a tirade in Hebrew. This is for a slogan to cast in the teeth of foreign idolaters:

这些神明，他们并没有创造天地，

These gods, who did not make the heavens and the earth,

必从地上、从天下消失。

will perish from the earth and from under the heavens.

耶利米书 10:11

Jeremiah x. 11

最终，信奉这些神灵的阿拉姆语使用者将继承大地，至少从印度到库什一带是如此。然而，这种语言之所以能在如此广袤的地域间通用，并非因为各地居民都实际使用这种语言，而是因为它作为一种书面通用语，被一个由识字的翻译和口译员组成的网络所理解，这个网络被称为“塞皮鲁”（sepīru）。统治者或官员会用自己的语言口述一封信，塞皮鲁会将其记录成阿拉姆语；当信件送达收件人手中时——波斯也以其卓越的邮政服务而闻名——另一位塞皮鲁会阅读信件，并用其主人的语言将其朗读出来。这个过程在阿拉姆语中被称为“paraš”，字面意思是“声明”，在波斯语中被称为“uzvārišn ” ，意为“解释”。⁴⁷

In the event, the Aramaic-speaking believers in those gods were due to inherit the earth, at least from India to Kush. However, the language was usable across these vast distances not because it was actually spoken by the various populations, but because it acted as a written interlingua, understood by a network of literate translators and interpreters, the sepīru. A ruler or official would dictate a letter in his own language, and the sepīru would write it down in Aramaic; when the document reached its addressee—Persia was also renowned for its excellent postal service—it would be read by another sepīru who would speak it aloud in whatever was the language of his master or mistress. This process was called paraš, literally ‘declaration’ in Aramaic, or uzvārišn, ‘explanation’ in Persian.⁴⁷

在《以斯拉记》4:18中，波斯王亚达薛西二世口头听取了幼发拉底河以东一些地方官员用亚兰语写的信。他开始回复（信是用亚兰语写的，但无疑是用波斯语口述的）：

In Ezra iv.18, the Persian king Artaxerxes receives in oral translation the Aramaic letter of some local government officials from Trans-Euphrates. He begins his reply (reported in Aramaic, but no doubt dictated in Persian):

您好，现在：

您寄来的信件已在我们面前翻译并宣读……

Greetings, and now:

the letter you sent us was translated and read in our presence …

这套实用的体系在国际上也得到应用，但其适用范围必然受到波斯语系以外语言双语字母表（sēpiru）普及程度的限制。在希腊人的伯罗奔尼撒战争中，公元前428年，波斯国王派往斯巴达的使者被雅典人截获：他的信件需要从亚述文字翻译过来。如果没有使者的翻译（paraš） ^，斯巴达的收信人恐怕难以理解这些信件的内容。48

The same practical system was in use internationally, though it must have been limited by the availability of bilingual sēpiru for languages beyond the Persian realm. In the Greeks’ Peloponnesian War, a messenger from the Persian king to Sparta was intercepted in 428 by the Athenians: his letters then needed to be translated ek t໗n Assuríōn grammátōn, ‘from the Assyrian writing’. It is unlikely that its real addressees in Sparta would have been able to make any sense of them without the messenger’s paraš.⁴⁸

这种体系的便利性必然是其传播的重要推动力，它甚至渗透到了一些令人惊叹的领域，尤其是在犹太教经典中。除了《以斯拉记》中的亚兰语书信外，《但以理书》（公元前二世纪成书）中的大段文字也是用亚兰语写成的，这恰如其分，因为该书讲述了这位犹太顾问在巴比伦宫廷中，在巴比伦和波斯历代君王统治下的各种冒险经历和异象。该书以希伯来语描述了他被巴比伦国王招募后，接受为期三年的“塞皮鲁”（sepīru ，即“迦勒底人的文字和语言”）训练的过程。 ⁴⁹

The convenience of this system must have acted as a strong motive for the spread of the language, and it gets into some amazing places, notably the Jewish scriptures. Besides the Aramaic letters in the book of Ezra, long passages in the book of Daniel (written in the second century BC) are written in Aramaic, appropriately so since it recounts the various adventures and visions of this Jewish counsellor at court in Babylon under a succession of Babylonian and then Persian kings. It begins with a Hebrew description of his training as a sepīru, after being recruited by the Babylonian king, a three-year course in ēpir ū-ləšôn kasdîm, ‘the writing and language of the Chaldaeans’.⁴⁹

这种巧妙地使用通用语，并以多语种的帕拉什语（paraš ）加以掩饰的做法（不禁让人想起那种天真的小说，旅行者可以去任何地方，立刻就能与当地人进行深入的交谈，丝毫不会察觉到任何语言障碍）与在其他官方场合继续使用当地语言完全兼容。一个例子是铸币上的铭文：事实上，这种带有政府担保的支付方式是近期才发明的（在吕底亚，即安纳托利亚西部）。它在波斯帝国的传播速度很慢，而且大多数同时期的硬币都来自西部行省。因此，波斯时代的硬币上刻有希腊语以及安纳托利亚南部几乎所有其他语言（吕底亚语、西提克语、卡里亚语和吕基亚语——都与赫梯语和卢维语相关）；阿拉姆语则在安纳托利亚北部（当时可能仍在使用弗里吉亚语）、西里西亚（曾是巴比伦帝国的一部分，与腓尼基有着密切联系）和美索不达米亚使用。埃及也曾铸造过用埃及世俗体文字书写的硬币^。50

This discreet use of a lingua franca disguised by multilingual paraš (rather reminiscent of that naive sort of fiction where travellers can go anywhere and at once get into serious conversations with the local people, never noticing any language barrier) was quite compatible with continuing use of local languages in other official functions. One example is the legends on coined money: in fact, this means of payment with a government guarantee had only recently been invented (in Lydia, western Anatolia). It spread only slowly in the Persian empire, and most contemporary coins come from the western provinces. So there are Persian-era coins inscribed in Greek and pretty much every other language of southern Anatolia (Lydian, Sidetic, Carian and Lycian—all related to Hittite and Luwian); Aramaic is used in northern parts of Anatolia (where Phrygian was probably still in use), in Cilicia (which had been part of the Babylonian empire, and had had strong links with Phoenicia) and in Mesopotamia. In Egypt there were also coins struck in demotic Egyptian.⁵⁰

尽管埃及并入波斯帝国的时间较晚，但埃及人仍然大量使用阿拉姆语。这种语言可能在此之前就已经传入，当时有大量来自亚兰、腓尼基、以东、犹大以及其他受巴比伦威胁或统治的国家的难民和移民涌入埃及，阿拉姆语实际上已成为当地的通用语言。但许多埃及人也被纳入了这个群体，阿拉姆语文献中出现的埃及人名便证明了这一点。当波斯人被托勒密王朝取代后，埃及人仍然继续使用阿拉姆语撰写法律文件。 ⁵¹

Still the Egyptians became heavy users of Aramaic, despite the lateness of Egypt’s annexation to the Persian empire. The language would have come in beforehand, along with a sizeable population of refugees and émigrés from Aram, Phoenicia, Edom, Judah and other countries threatened or dominated by Babylon, with a de facto common language in Aramaic. But many Egyptians were also drawn into this community, as the Egyptian names occurring in Aramaic texts show, and when the Persians were replaced by the Ptolemies Egyptians continued to use Aramaic for legal documents.⁵¹

由于埃及气候干燥，几乎所有现存的这一时期阿拉姆语文献都保存在埃及，这些文献大多写在纸莎草纸或皮革上，尤其是波斯总督阿尔萨梅斯（Arsames）的信件、一个家族在卢克索和塞恩（阿斯旺）沿尼罗河上下辗转寄送的信件，以及塞恩保存的犹太军事驻军档案，其中包括相当数量的法律文件和寄往耶路撒冷的商务信函。此外，埃及还保存着贤哲阿希卡尔（Ahiqar）的箴言。阿希卡尔是公元前七世纪初亚述国王西拿基立和埃萨尔哈顿宫廷的传奇顾问，其中一句箴言被用作本章第二部分的题词。由于亲身经历过宫廷生活，他尤其关注泄密和恶意流言的危害。

Egypt, because of its dry climate, has provided almost all the surviving texts in Aramaic from this period, written on papyrus or leather, particularly the correspondence of a Persian governor (satrap) called Arsames, a packet of letters from a family distributed between Luxor and Syene (Aswan) up and down the Nile, and at Syene the archives of the Jewish military garrison, including a fair number of legal documents and business letters to Jerusalem. This also includes the proverbs of the sage Ahiqar, a legendary counsellor at the court of the Assyrian kings Sennacherib and Esarhaddon in the early seventh century BC, one of which appears as epigraph to the second section of this chapter. Having experience of life at court, he is particularly concerned about the power of leaks and malicious gossip:

我的儿子，

My son,

不要喋喋不休，想到什么就说什么；因为人们的目光和耳朵无时无刻不在注视着你的言语。要小心，免得因此而自取灭亡。要比任何事都更加谨慎，谨防你的言语，对于你所听到的，要铁石心肠。

Chatter not overmuch so that thou speak out every word that come to thy mind; for men’s eyes and ears are everywhere trained upon thy mouth. Beware lest it be thy undoing. More than all watchfulness watch thy mouth, and over what thou hearest harden thy heart.

言语如鸟，一旦放飞，无人能捉住。先算清你口中的秘密，再按着数目说出你的话语。因为口中的教诲胜过战争的教诲。

For a word is a bird: once released no man can recapture it. First count the secrets of thy mouth: then bring out thy words by number. For the instruction of a mouth is stronger than the instruction of war.

切勿轻视君王的命令：愿它成为你心灵的疗愈…… ⁵²

Treat not lightly the word of a king: let it be healing for thy flesh …⁵²

这些信件揭示，正如耶利米所哀叹的那样，一些犹太人确实与外邦神灵关系密切。请看这封写在一块碎陶片上的仆人的话：“致我主米该亚，您的仆人基德尔。我祝您平安健康。我奉耶和华和克努布（当地神灵）的名祝福您。请将您身上穿的衣服送来，他们会为您缝补。我特此送来一封信，祝您平安。” ⁵³

The letters reveal that some Jews, as Jeremiah had lamented, were indeed on pretty familiar terms with alien gods. Consider this from a valet, written on a piece of broken pottery: ‘To my lord Micaiah, your servant Giddel. I send you welfare and life. I bless you by Yaho [i.e. Yahweh] and Khnub [a local god]. Now send me the garment you are wearing and they will mend it. I send the note for your welfare.’⁵³

在遥远的北方安纳托利亚，人们所说的语言一定至少和硬币上的铭文一样多种多样；然而，人们发现了希腊语、吕底亚语和吕西亚语的铭文，并附有阿拉姆语的翻译，特别是法律的纪念碑铭文。

Away to the north in Anatolia, languages spoken must have been at least as various as the coin legends; nevertheless, inscriptions in Greek, Lydian and Lycian have been found accompanied by translation in Aramaic, especially for monumental inscriptions of laws.

阿拉姆语的广泛传播也体现在帝国另一端的印度皇帝阿育王的三份宣传铭文中（参见第五章“梵语在印度生活中的作用”，第187页）。这些铭文的年代较晚，公元前三世纪，当时阿拉姆语已被希腊语取代，成为伊朗的官方行政语言。然而，在语言转变三四代之后，阿育王仍然认为有必要用阿拉姆语和希腊语两种语言竖立这些永久性的美德劝诫铭文——其中特别推荐素食主义。

The pervasiveness of Aramaic is also demonstrated at the opposite end of the empire by three propaganda inscriptions of the Indian emperor Aśoka (see Chapter 5, ‘Sanskrit in Indian life’, p. 187). These date from a later era, the third century BC, when Aramaic had already been supplanted by Greek as the official language of administration across Iran. Nevertheless, Aśoka still saw fit to put up these permanent exhortations to virtue—with vegetarianism specifically recommended—in Aramaic as well as Greek, three or four generations after the change.

… KAI AIIEXETAI

……并弃权

… and abstains

动物之王和其他一切依然

the King from animals and the rest still

男人以及所有猎人和渔民

of men and all hunters and fishermen

国王已经停止狩猎……

of the King have ceased hunting …

此外，就食物而言，为了我们的国王陛下，很少有牲畜被宰杀：鉴于此，所有人都停止了捕猎；就连捕鱼的人，也被禁止捕猎…… ⁵⁴

And besides, as regards food, for our lord the King few [animals] are killed: seeing this, all men have ceased; even fish catchers, those people are under a prohibition…⁵⁴

迄今为止，在这一边境地区已发现三处阿拉姆语铭文，分别位于坎大哈、喀布尔以东的拉格曼（兰帕卡） ⁵⁵以及学术中心塔克西拉（塔克西拉），所有这些地点都位于波斯人所称的犍陀罗省境内。按现代标准来看，它们位于阿富汗边境，但更靠近与巴基斯坦接壤的边境，这表明阿拉姆语已渗透到波斯控制范围的边缘，甚至可能更远，并可能拥有其自身的文化发展动力。^*

There have been three Aramaic inscriptions discovered so far in this border area, in Kandahar, in Laghman, east of Kabul (Lampāka),⁵⁵ and the academic centre of Taxila (Takaśila), all of which would have been in the Persian province claimed as Gandhara. In modern terms, they are on the borders of Afghanistan, but on its far borders abutting Pakistan, demonstrating the penetration of Aramaic to the very limits of Persian control and perhaps even beyond, presumably with some cultural momentum of its own.^*

阿拉姆语的辉煌走向终结，并非像阿拉姆语终结阿卡德语长期统治那样，是通过渗透渗透实现的。而是通过直接而突然的征服实现的。

When Aramaic came to the end of its glory, it was not through infiltration, as Aramaic had ended the long reign of Akkadian. It was through outright and sudden conquest.

在波斯国王大流士和薛西斯试图结束爱琴海沿岸希腊城邦的独立统治却以失败告终（尽管他们轻而易举地征服了与安纳托利亚接壤的希腊城邦）五代之后，另一个强权在波斯失败的地方取得了成功。马其顿的腓力二世征服了整个欧洲希腊，并始终声称自己是希腊人。这种基于语言和文化的说法出人意料地难以证实，因为几乎没有马其顿语的词汇流传下来。 ⁵⁶但他的儿子亚历山大，或许是出于不安全感而产生的侵略性，^决定通过报复波斯人入侵希腊时希腊人遭受的侮辱来证明自己的归属。（但这并没有阻止他在波斯国王被自己的人民刺杀后，向波斯人宣称自己是合法的继承人。）

Five generations after the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes had tried and failed to end the independence of the Greek city-states across the Aegean (although they had quite easily tamed the Greek cities that bordered Anatolia), another power succeeded where Persia failed. Philip of Macedon reduced all of European Greece, claiming all the while to be a Greek himself. This claim, made on grounds of language and culture, is surprisingly difficult to substantiate, since hardly a word of the Macedonian language has survived.⁵⁶ But his son Alexander, perhaps with an aggression that stemmed from insecurity,^† decided to demonstrate his belonging by undertaking to avenge the affront that the Greeks had suffered when the Persians tried to invade. (Not that this prevented him, after the reigning king of Persia had been assassinated by his own people, from claiming to the Persians that he was the rightful successor.)

公元前333年至323年的十年间，他取得了彻底的胜利。尽管他并未征服所有行省，但包括埃及和阿富汗在内的庞大波斯帝国，如今都已成为马其顿王室的领地。马其顿人统治波斯和美索不达米亚地区近两百年，直到公元前140年才被帕提亚人的阿尔沙克一世所征服。

Within the ten years 333-323 BC he had succeeded totally. Although he had not campaigned in every province, the vast Persian empire, including its extremities in Egypt and Afghanistan, was now a possession of the royal house of Macedon. Macedonians stayed in control of the Persian and Mesopotamian part for almost two hundred years, yielding to Arsaces, first of the Parthians, only in 140 BC.

在“希腊化”时期，中东很可能实际上是多种语言混合使用的，新统治者的希腊语与旧统治者的阿拉姆语相互竞争。（参见第六章“亚洲诸王：希腊语通过战争传播”，第243页。）阿拉姆语在美索不达米亚、叙利亚和巴勒斯坦的地位显然要稳固得多，因为在这些地区，阿拉姆语至少比在安纳托利亚和伊朗早了五百年的历史。在安纳托利亚和伊朗，阿拉姆语仅仅在两百年前才由万王之王颁布法令确立为官方语言。此外，亚历山大征服之后，希腊人在安纳托利亚的定居点肯定比在伊朗更为密集，因为安纳托利亚沿海地区早已被希腊殖民地环绕，而伊朗则远在托罗斯山脉和扎格罗斯山脉之外。尽管波斯从吕底亚的萨迪斯到波斯波利斯的皇家大道意味着该地区的交通比当时已知世界的任何其他地方都更加便利。

It is likely that in this ‘Hellenistic’ period the Middle East was in fact governed in a mixture of languages, the new masters’ Greek competing with the old masters’ Aramaic. (See Chapter 6, ‘Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war’, p. 243.) Aramaic clearly held its ground far better in Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, where it had at least five hundred more years of background than in Anatolia and Iran, where it had only been established as a language of government by the King of Kings’ fiat, a bare two hundred years before. In addition, after Alexander’s conquest, Greek settlement would have been much heavier in Anatolia, already surrounded as it was by Greek colonies on its coasts, than in Iran, far beyond the Taurus and Zagros mountains, even if Persia’s Royal Road from Sardis in Lydia to Persepolis meant that the area already enjoyed better communications than anywhere else in the known world.

这导致希腊人在亚历山大帝国不同地区的后续发展截然不同。在中部和东部，希腊语仅仅作为一种通用语存在。公元前二世纪，随着帕提亚人（来自伊朗东部，使用一种接近波斯语的语言）的崛起，希腊在这些地区的统治结束，希腊语的官方地位也随之终结。此后，语言状况似乎又回到了波斯帝国早期的水平：阿拉姆语在美索不达米亚地区几乎继续使用，而波斯语的一种变体则在更东边的地区使用。

This led to rather different subsequent careers for Greek in these different parts of Alexander’s empire. Greek remained as no more than a lingua franca in the centre and east. The Greek administration here was ended by the rise of the Parthians (from eastern Iran, and speaking a language close to Persian) in the second century BC, and this put an end to official status for Greek. It seems that there may have been a return to a language situation rather like the early years of the Persian empire, with Aramaic continuing for all practical purposes in Mesopotamia, but a form of Persian now in use farther east.

相比之下，在西方，希腊语已经完全取代了之前的语言（尤其是吕底亚语、吕基亚语和阿拉姆语）。公元前一世纪罗马人征服西方后，他们保留了希腊语作为事实上的行政语言，只在法庭和军队中使用拉丁语。（受过教育的罗马人本来就都懂希腊语。）这意味着安纳托利亚几乎完全变成了希腊语的单一语言地区，而在叙利亚和巴勒斯坦，希腊语被用来治理一个仍然主要讲阿拉姆语的地区。在埃及，情况则更为复杂，因为埃及语仍然存在，而且托勒密王朝在其首都亚历山大城周围鼓励建立一个极其国际化的社会，例如，那里的犹太社区大多讲希腊语。

In the west, by contrast, Greek had fully replaced the previous languages (notably Lydian, Lycian and Aramaic). When the Romans took it over in the first century BC they kept Greek on as the de facto language of administration, insisting on Latin only in the courts and the army. (Educated Romans all knew Greek anyway.) This meant that Anatolia became almost monolingual in Greek, while in Syria and Palestine Greek was used to govern a public that still predominantly spoke Aramaic. In Egypt, the situation was complicated by the survival of the Egyptian language, as well as the extremely cosmopolitan society encouraged by the Ptolemies around their capital, Alexandria, where, for example, the Jewish community was largely Greek-speaking.

因此，希腊语作为单一语言在波斯帝国的出现，对将语言差异暴露出来产生了显著的影响，而波斯帝国原本被认为已经统一在阿拉米语之下。

The advent of the single language Greek across the Persian empire, a domain supposedly already unified under Aramaic, thus had a remarkable effect in bringing the linguistic differences to the surface.

第二幕间奏：信仰之盾

SECOND INTERLUDE: THE SHIELD OF FAITH

拿撒勒人耶稣说亚兰语，但以他自己人的标准来看，他的亚兰语并不算好。他的故乡加利利通常被认为说的是一种不太标准的亚兰语，在耶路撒冷和犹太的受过教育的人听来，这是一种“北方口音”；众所周知，他的门徒彼得的口音在关键时刻暴露了他的身份，甚至在博学的《塔木德》中，也偶尔会出现拿加利利口音开玩笑的段落^。

Jesus of Nazareth spoke Aramaic, though not of the best, by the standards of his own people. His native Galilee was generally reckoned to speak a substandard variety, a ‘North Country’ accent to the ears of the educated of Jerusalem and Judaea; famously, his disciple Peter’s accent gave him away at a crucial moment, and even in the learned Talmud there is the occasional joke at the expense of Galilean pronunciation.^*

耶稣死后形成的这群基督徒的语言显然是亚兰语；撒玛利亚基督徒（撒玛利亚位于加利利以南）至今仍在使用这种语言。但这个新兴的信仰有着世界性的抱负，他们的第一次公开活动（记载于《使徒行传》第二章）是五旬节，在那次节庆中，使徒们奇迹般地能够用各种语言讲道。这种突然出现的语言天赋并没有持续下去，因此他们必须找到一种合适的媒介来出版圣经。考虑到他们身处以地中海为中心的罗马帝国，希腊语是一个合理的选择。希腊语也没有亚兰语所带有的犹太教色彩，以免损害基督教对非犹太人的吸引力。因此，基督教圣经，即所谓的“新约”，就是用希腊语写成的。它成为了西方教会的第一语言。

The language of the group that formed after Jesus’s death clearly was Aramaic; and Samaritan Christians (Samaria is just south of Galilee) have gone on speaking the language to the present day. But the new faith had cosmopolitan aspirations, and their first public event (recorded in Acts ii) was the pentecostal feast at which its apostles miraculously became able to preach in all manner of languages. This sudden gift for languages did not persist, and so a convenient medium had to be found to publish the scriptures. Given that they were in the Roman empire, centred on the Mediterranean, Greek was a reasonable choice. It was also free of the Jewish associations that hung about Aramaic, and might have tarnished Christianity’s appeal to gentiles. Greek accordingly was the language in which the Christian scriptures, the so-called ‘New Testament’, were composed. It became the first language of the Church in the west.

然而，世界远比罗马及其环绕海洋的“陆地圈”（orbis terrārum）要大。值得注意的是，最早被提及为五旬节神迹见证人的外国人是帕提亚人、米底人、以拦人和美索不达米亚居民，他们当时都不在罗马的统治之下。而且，正如我们在此之前所看到的（在东方的塞琉古帝国灭亡七代之后），他们更有可能理解阿拉姆语而非希腊语。

Nevertheless, the world was bigger than Rome and the ‘circle of lands’ (orbis terrārum) that surrounded its sea. Significantly, the first foreigners mentioned as witnesses to the pentecostal miracle are Parthians, Medes, Elamites and dwellers in Mesopotamia, none of them at the time under Roman rule, and as we have seen by this time (seven generations after the fall of the Seleucid empire in the east) much more likely to understand Aramaic than Greek.

早期基督教教会历经两百年才得以建立，但最终确实发展出了一个面向东方的重要分支。其中心位于埃德萨（今乌尔法^†），这座城市位于地中海沿岸安条克以东通往阿拉姆纳哈拉姆的尼西比斯（努赛宾）和米底的阿格巴塔纳（哈马丹）的主要路线上。埃德萨及其信徒的语言是阿拉姆语，在当地被称为叙利亚语。这是我们首次发现语言传播的全新动机——为了赢得新宗教的信徒。尽管原著是用希腊语写成的，但《新约》和大多数早期基督教文献都被翻译成叙利亚语，并发展出一种独特的文学形式，包括赞美诗、布道和更广泛的论述，这种文学形式一直活跃到公元13世纪，尽管期间伊斯兰入侵不断^。§

It took two hundred years to get established, but the early Christian Church did get a major wing oriented towards the east. It was based at Edessa (modern and ancient Urfa^†), a city on the major route east from Antioch on the Mediterranean towards Nisibis (Nusaybin) in Aram Naharaim, and Agbatana (Hamadan) in Media. The language of Edessa and its believers was Aramaic, here known as Syriac. This is our first example of a radically new motive for language spread, the drive to win converts to a new religion. Although the originals were in Greek, the New Testament and most early Christian literature was translated into Syriac, and became the basis of a literature of its own, of hymns, sermons and wider disquisitions, continuing actively until the thirteenth century AD, despite the swirls of Islamic invasions that passed round and about it.^§

如同蜂蜜从蜂巢滴落，

如同母乳从慈爱的母亲流淌，

我的盼望也如此仰望你，我的神。

如同泉水涌流，

我的心也涌出对耶和华的赞美

，我的嘴唇也倾泻赞美他；

我的舌头因与他交谈而甘甜，

我的脸因他带来的喜乐而欢欣，

我的灵因他的爱

而喜乐，我的灵魂因他而明亮。

敬畏耶和华的人可以满怀信心，

因为他的救恩已得着保障；

他必得永生，

凡领受这永生的人都是不朽的。哈利路亚！

As honey drips from a honeycomb,

and milk flows from a woman full of love for her children,

so is my hope upon you, my God.

As a fountain gushes forth its water,

so does my heart gush forth the praise of the Lord

and my lips pour out praise to him;

my tongue is sweet from converse with him,

my face exults in the jubilation he brings,

my spirit is jubilant at his love

and by him my soul is illumined.

He who holds the Lord in awe may have confidence,

for his salvation is assured;

he will gain immortal life,

and those who receive this are incorruptible. Hallelujah!

所罗门颂歌，第40首，^第57首

Odes of Solomon, no. 40⁵⁷

当然，语言的传播必须与宗教的传播区分开来。例如，埃德萨是基督教的源头，基督教于公元303年传入亚美尼亚。但亚美尼亚人并没有放弃自己的语言，即便他们建立了历史上第一个民族基督教教会，即便如果没有阿拉姆语文字，梅斯罗普·马什托茨主教也永远无法设计出今天仍在使用的亚美尼亚字母。

The spread of a language has to be distinguished from the spread of the religion, of course. Edessa was the source, for example, of the Christianity that reached Armenia in 303. But the Armenians were not tempted to give up their own language, even if they were setting up the first national Christian Church in history, and even though without Aramaic script Bishop Mesrop Mashtotz would never have designed the Armenian alphabet, still in use today.

尽管如此，叙利亚语还是随着传教士们传播开来，至少在礼仪和书面形式上是如此。聂斯托利派基督徒于公元489年被皇帝下令驱逐出埃德萨，并被判定为异端，他们将叙利亚语带到了波斯。正如前文所述，当时阿拉姆语在波斯仍然非常盛行。他们的下一个据点就在不远处的尼西比斯。但聂斯托利派并未止步于此。他们的传教士继续前往印度，在卡利亚纳（孟买附近）建立了一个主教区，并在更南边的喀拉拉邦建立了一系列修道院，与圣托马斯基督徒联合起来。据说，圣托马斯基督徒的传教活动可以追溯到使徒托马斯的传教活动——托马斯自然也是阿拉姆语的母语使用者。当欧洲人在19世纪重新发现他们时，他们仍然拥有用叙利亚语写成的圣经和宗教手稿，尽管这种语言似乎很少用于宗教仪式。

Still, the language did travel, at the very least in liturgical and written form, with the preachers. Christians of the Nestorian persuasion, judged heretical and exiled from Edessa by imperial order in 489, carried Syriac out to Persia, where as already seen Aramaic was still very much at home. Their next base was just up the road in Nisibis. But the Nestorians did not stop there. Their missionaries went on into India, where they established a bishopric in Kalyana (near Mumbai), and a cluster of monasteries farther south, especially in Kerala, joining forces with the St Thomas Christians, supposedly dating from the missionary activities of the apostle—another native speaker of Aramaic, naturally. When they were rediscovered by Europeans in the nineteenth century, they still had Bibles and religious manuscripts written in Syriac, though it seems the language was little used in worship.

聂斯托利派也继续沿着丝绸之路从波斯向东迁徙至中亚，最终抵达蒙古的喀喇昆仑和中国北方城市。僧侣阿洛本于公元635年抵达中国首都长安（今西安），这一事件被铭刻于公元781年，碑文为叙利亚语和汉语双语。 ⁵⁸

The Nestorians also kept travelling east from Persia along the Silk Road into central Asia, at last reaching Karakorum in Mongolia, and the northern cities of China. The arrival of the monk Alopen in the Chinese capital Changan (Xian) in 635 is commemorated on a stele set up in 781, bilingual in Syriac and Chinese.⁵⁸

两个世纪后，他们在中国基本消失；更西边的教会残余在十四世纪被军阀帖木儿（帖木儿）几乎全部消灭。但聂斯托利派在其发源地附近，即美索不达米亚和更北的库尔德斯坦地区幸存下来。他们的传统以及叙利亚语的使用在亚述教会和迦勒底教会中得以保留。其他一些使用叙利亚语的所谓叙利亚雅各派教会的成员，主要居住在安提阿和埃德萨附近，他们的传教活动也主要沿着阿拉伯的商队路线进行，他们也以较小的规模幸存下来^。

Two centuries later they had largely disappeared from China; and remnants of the Church farther west were mostly exterminated in the fourteenth century by the warlord Timur-i-leng (Tamburlaine). But Nestorians survived closer to their founding areas, in Mesopotamia and farther north in Kurdistan. Their tradition, and the use of Syriac, survives in the Assyrian and Chaldaean churches. Other Syriac speakers, of the so-called Syrian Jacobite Church, who stayed more at home round Antioch and Edessa, and whose missionary activity was aimed more along caravan routes in Arabia, have also survived in small numbers.^*

所有这些英勇的传教活动最终结果并不显著：阿拉姆语或叙利亚语仅在靠近其发源地的小范围内幸存下来，^†但这种语言确实存续了下来。它的存续归功于使用者们维护社群的决心，而这些社群都建立在宗教之上。

The net result of all this heroic proselytism has been modest: Aramaic or Syriac has survived in small pockets quite close to its original homes,^† But the language has survived. It owes its survival to its speakers’ determination to maintain their communities, and those communities have all been based on a religion.

这种“宗教信仰式”的生存之道至多只有两千五百年的历史，似乎是近东语言，特别是亚非语系语言的特征。通过这种策略幸存下来的最著名语言是希伯来语：我们已经注意到，正是对自身身份的坚持——这种身份认同由一套宗教准则所界定——解释了希伯来语得以存续的原因，这与两千年前其姊妹语言腓尼基语的彻底消亡形成了鲜明对比。这种策略要想奏效，语言社群的宗教信仰必须与周边居民的宗教信仰显著不同。

This ‘confessional’ route to survival is at most two and a half thousand years old, and seems characteristic of the languages of the Near East, particularly Afro-Asiatic languages. The most notable language to survive by this strategy is Hebrew: we have already noted how it is the adherence to its own identity, marked out by a religious code, which explains its survival by contrast with the total oblivion suffered two thousand years ago by its sister language Phoenician. For the strategy to work, the religion of the language community must be significantly different from that of the population that surrounds it.

另一个例子是科普特语，它是埃及语的最后遗存。科普特语原本是埃及的祖语，^与从近东传入的阿拉姆语和希腊语截然不同。但在穆斯林征服之后，科普特语与埃及的基督教人口联系日益紧密；因为正如帝国的大部分地区一样，在罗马皇帝君士坦丁于公元四世纪初公开皈依基督教之后，基督徒在埃及逐渐成为多数群体。

Another example is the Coptic language, the final survival of Egyptian. This had simply been Egypt’s ancestral language,^§ as distinct from the interloping Aramaic and Greek that had come in from the Near East, but after the Muslim conquest it became associated more and more with the Christian population of Egypt; for as in most parts of the empire, Christians had come to be the majority after the Roman emperor Constantine’s public embrace of their faith in the early fourth century.

穆斯林对待科普特人的态度逐渐恶化。没有人知道基督徒在人口中的比例下降了多少，但确实下降了，尤其是在北部地区，以至于在几个世纪里，科普特人在南部地区反而更强大。从七世纪到九世纪，科普特人享有宗教自由和公民自治权，但与其他非穆斯林一样，他们也需要缴纳特殊的税款。然而，在公元829年，科普特人起义反抗税吏，遭到残酷镇压。此后，在不同的穆斯林王朝统治下，科普特人的处境时好时坏，但总体趋势是科普特人口——以及在礼拜仪式之外使用科普特语的人数——不断减少。直到公元820年，仍有神学著作问世，新的赞美诗也一直创作到十四世纪初。事实上，当时的语言社群十分活跃，以至于三角洲方言博海里克语（Bohairic）取代了上埃及方言萨希德语（Sahidic），成为标准语：1132年至1145年间，宗主教加布里埃尔二世将其指定用于宗教仪式。尽管14世纪之后出现了一些文化复兴，但博海里克语并未重新融入日常生活。不过，它一直沿用至今，用于宗教仪式，并且有迹象表明，人们正在认真尝试复兴它。

The Muslims’ treatment of the Copts gradually soured. No one knows how fast the percentage of Christians in the population fell, but fall it did, especially in the north of the country, so that for some centuries Coptic was stronger in the south. Through the seventh to ninth centuries the Copts were guaranteed freedom of religion and civil autonomy, although like non-Muslims everywhere they were subject to special taxes. But in 829 the Copts revolted against tax collectors, and were severely put down. Thereafter conditions sporadically worsened and occasionally improved under a variety of Muslim dynasties, but the consistent trend was for the Coptic population—and use of the language outside the liturgy—to diminish. Theological works were still being written until 820, and new hymns went on being composed until early in the fourteenth century. The language community was in fact sufficiently lively for the Delta dialect, Bohairic, to supplant Sahidic, the dialect of Upper Egypt, as the standard: it was consecrated for use in liturgy by Patriarch Gabriel II in 1132-45. Although there were cultural revivals after the fourteenth century, the language did not come back into daily life. But it has persisted in liturgy to the present day, and there are signs of serious attempts to revive it.

因此，科普特语是近东地区另一种语言的例子，它因与特定信仰的联系而得以在日益艰难的时期中延续下来。与之形成对比的是稍南一些的另一种幸存语言：吉兹语，埃塞俄比亚教会的语言。吉兹语是一种古典语言（与南阿拉伯的古代语言相关，其地位最终归功于史前时期跨越红海的入侵）。尽管它像科普特语一样，因在基督教礼拜仪式中的作用而得以幸存，但它的命运更接近拉丁语或梵语，而非科普特语。埃塞俄比亚至今仍是一个基督教国家，吉兹语周围环绕着提格雷尼亚语、提格雷语和阿姆哈拉语等子语和外语。吉兹语的保存依靠的是情感和语言保守主义，但它所代表的语言传统依然鲜活，并且没有受到任何外部威胁，无论是语言、社会还是宗教方面的威胁。

Coptic, then, is another example of a language of the Near East which has been sustained through a period of growing adversity through its association with a distinctive faith. It can be contrasted with a survival a little farther south: Ge’ez, the language of the Ethiopian Church. This is a classical language (related to the ancient languages of South Arabia, and owes its position ultimately to a prehistoric invasion across the Red Sea). Although it survived, like Coptic, through its role in Christian liturgy, its fate is much more like that of Latin or Sanskrit than Coptic. Ethiopia continues to be a Christian country, and Ge’ez is surrounded by daughter and niece languages, Tigrinya, Tigre and Amharic. Ge’ez has been preserved by sentiment and linguistic conservatism, but the linguistic tradition it represents is alive and under no external threat, linguistic, social or religious.

相比之下，我们不妨称之为“信仰之盾”的语言生存策略，在过去两百年间确实被频繁运用，而且并非局限于近东或亚非语系地区。毕竟，正是这种策略使得“宾夕法尼亚德语”（即德语）在美国阿米什人这个独立的社群中得以保存。 ⁵⁹也正是这种策略，自1865年以来，使得威尔士语在阿根廷巴塔哥尼亚风吹日晒的平原上的非国教教堂社群中得以保存。 ⁶⁰甚至可以说，这种策略正被以更强大的力量重新运用，用于在新生的以色列国重建希伯来语。

By contrast, what we may call the ‘Shield of Faith’ strategy for language survival has indeed been used quite often in the last couple of hundred years, and far away from the Near East, or Afro-Asiatic languages. It is this, after all, which has preserved ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’, i.e. German, among the separate community of the Amish in the USA.⁵⁹ And it is this which since 1865 has preserved Welsh in the Nonconformist chapel community of Argentina, on the wind-swept plains of Patagonia.⁶⁰ It could even be claimed that it is being reapplied, with a vengeance, to rebuild the Hebrew language in the new state of Israel.

但作为对这一领域回顾的最后一部分，我们现在必须转向另一种语言，这种语言无情地利用了其宗教关联，不仅是为了生存，更是为了扩张，而且扩张速度和持久性都超过了已知的任何其他语言。

But we must now turn, as the last part of our review of this area, to another language that has exploited its confessional associations mercilessly, not simply to survive but to expand, and to expand faster and more lastingly than any other language known.

阿拉伯语——雄辩与平等：臣服的胜利

Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission’

'a ibbū al 'araba liθin：li 'anī 'arabiyyun，wa al-qur 'ānu ' arabiyyun，wa kalāmu 'ahli al-jinnati 'arabiyyun。

’aibbū al ‘araba liθin: li ‘anī ‘arabiyyun, wa al-qur ’ānu ’ arabiyyun, wa kalāmu ’ahli al-jinnati ’arabiyyun.

我喜欢阿拉伯人有三个原因：因为我是阿拉伯人，因为《古兰经》是用阿拉伯语写的，因为天堂的居民说阿拉伯语。

Love the Arabs for three reasons: because I am an Arab, because the Qur’ān is in Arabic and because the inhabitants of Paradise speak Arabic.

^{穆罕默德（61）}语录

Saying attributed to Muhammad⁶¹

阿拉伯语是另一种闪米特语，与近东地区早先出现的阿拉米语和阿卡德语密切相关。它的记录可以追溯到公元前四世纪北阿拉伯的铭文。但其使用者主要是沙漠中的贝都因人和牧民，他们一直游离于该地区所有先前帝国的有效控制（或许也缺乏关注）之外。

Arabic is another Semitic language closely related to the Aramaic and Akkadian that preceded it in the Near East. Its records actually go back to North Arabian inscriptions of the fourth century BC. But its speakers, mainly desert Bedouin and pastoralists, had remained outside the effective control (and perhaps interest) of all the previous empires in the region.

当他们展现出真正的实力时，其结果令人震惊。在先知穆罕默德于公元632年去世后的25年内，他们征服了整个新月沃土和波斯，并深入亚美尼亚和阿塞拜疆。他们向西的扩张速度更快：埃及于公元641年陷落，并在接下来的十年里征服了北非其他地区，直至突尼斯。两代人之后，到公元712年，阿拉伯语已成为从西部的托莱多和丹吉尔到东部的撒马尔罕和信德这一连串被征服地区的宗教和政府语言。至今无人能清晰地解释阿拉伯人是如何做到这一点的，以及他们为何能够做到这一点。62^通常的解释是，东方存在权力真空（当时的罗马/拜占庭帝国和伊朗萨珊王朝刚刚从一场旷日持久的战争中恢复过来），而西方则缺乏任何组织抵抗的力量。

When they showed their mettle, the results were truly astounding. Within twenty-five years of the prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, they had conquered all of the Fertile Crescent and Persia, and thrust into Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their lightning advance was even more penetrating towards the west: Egypt fell in 641 and the rest of North Africa as far as Tunisia in the next decade. Two generations later, by 712, the Arabic language had become the medium of worship and government in a continuous band of conquered territories from Toledo and Tangier in the west to Samarkand and Sind in the east. No one has ever explained clearly how or why the Arabs could do this.⁶² An appeal is usually made to a power vacuum in the east (where the Roman/Byzantine empire and the Sassanian empire of Iran were just recovering from their exhausting war), and the absence of any power to organise resistance in the west.

无论是什么原因导致了防御的薄弱，一系列成功的袭击汇聚成一股入侵浪潮，如同海啸般席卷而来。这场入侵起源于一个新兴的小国，其根基位于阿拉伯的麦地那和麦加两座城市，该国近期受到神圣启示的鼓舞，信奉了一种全新的、令人震惊的抽象教义。

Whatever caused the feebleness of the defences, a series of successful raids became harmonised into a wave of invasion that rolled on with the momentum of a tsunami. It originated in a small new state, based on the cities of Medina and Mecca in Arabia, which had recently been energised by divine revelation, embracing a new, and startlingly abstract, creed.

Lā 'lāha ill' Allāhu, wa Mu ammadun rasūlu 'llāhi

Lā ’lāha ill’ Allāhu, wa Muammadun rasūlu ‘llāhi

除真主外，别无应受崇拜的，穆罕默德是真主的使者。

There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the apostle of God

这句被称为“沙哈达” （šahādah）的信条，即伊斯兰教的信仰宣言，被尊为伊斯兰教“五大支柱”之首，其力量无比强大；它如同盾牌般化作利剑。然而，它的名字“伊斯兰”（Islām ）通常被译为“顺从”（顺从真主）；其闪米特语词根“slm”（也出现在动词形式“muslim”中）也是表示和平的词汇的基础（例如阿拉伯语问候语“salām 'aleykum ”，意为“愿你平安”）。因此，具有双重讽刺意味的是，这个名字意为“和平接纳”的宗教，却以如此强大的风暴席卷了世界。

This šahādah, the declaration of Muslim faith, and respected as the first of its ‘pillars’, was elemental in its power; it was a faith turned from shield into sword. Yet its name, Islām, is usually translated as ‘submission’ (to God); and its Semitic root slm (also seen in the agent form muslim) is also the basis of words for peace (as in Arabic’s own greeting salām ‘aleykum, ‘peace with you’). Doubly ironic, then, that this religion, whose name means peaceful acceptance, burst upon the world so mightily by storm.

但语言在伊斯兰教中的重要性远不止于创作一句响亮的口号。雄辩，即语言本身的力量，由真主启示并向所有愿意聆听的人宣讲，在赢得皈依伊斯兰教的过程中发挥了首要作用，听众无法解释穆罕默德言辞的美妙之处，只能将其视为神圣的启示。一个经典的例子是欧麦尔·伊本·哈塔卜，他是穆罕默德的同代人，也是公认的口头诗歌权威，他决心反对穆罕默德，甚至可能要刺杀他。然而，当他亲耳聆听先知的教诲时，他不禁惊叹：“这言辞多么优美高尚啊！”于是，他皈依了伊斯兰教。

But the importance of language in Islam went far beyond the production of a telling slogan. Eloquence, the sheer power of the word, as dictated by God and declaimed to all who would listen, played the first role in winning converts for Islam, leaving hearers no explanation for the beauty of Muhammad’s words but divine inspiration. The classic example is ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, a contemporary of Muhammad and acknowledged authority on oral poetry, determined to oppose, perhaps even to assassinate, him. Exposed directly to the prophet’s words, he could only cry out: ‘How fine and noble is this speech!’ And he was converted.

在这一宗教的传播过程中，语言也以一种独特的方式被运用。先知穆罕默德本人不识字，但他的言论很快就以某种未被记录的方式被记录下来。由此形成的文本立即被视为神圣且绝对权威；它不得更改，但允许（如同希伯来圣经一样）用一些点和短横线来标注元音，以帮助那些母语非阿拉伯语的人，因为他们可能需要一些帮助才能读懂纯辅音。^*它被称为《古兰经》（Qur'ān），意为“诵读”，源自闪米特语中表示朗读的词根“qr'”。众所周知，这部经文的开端是天使加百列命令穆罕默德开始诵读的：

Language was used in a unique way in the spread of this religion too. The authentic utterances of the prophet, himself illiterate, were soon, in some undocumented way, reduced to writing. The text so arrived at was immediately holy and absolutely authoritative; it could not be changed, although it was permissible (as in the Hebrew scriptures) to annotate it with some dots and dashes to mark the vowel sounds, for the benefit of those whose Arabic was not native, and who consequently might need some help in reading the bare consonants.^* It was known as the Qur ‘ān, ‘recitation’, based on qr’, the common Semitic root for reading aloud, and famously begun when the Angel Gabriel commanded Muhammad:

iqra ' bismi rabbika alla ī xalaqa, xalaqa l''insāna min 'alaqin

iqra ’ bismi rabbika allaī xalaqa, xalaqa l’’insāna min ‘alaqin

奉你的创造主之名诵读，他从胚胎创造了人^。63

Recite, in the name of your Lord who created, created man from embryo.⁶³

这些独特的经文，一套完全封闭的体系，是伊斯兰教的伟大宝藏，信徒们不断地研读和诵读它们。穆斯林似乎将它们的存在视为正统启示宗教的标志，因为在他们的领地内，其他启示一神教的信徒，如犹太教徒及其《塔纳赫》（TaNaK）、基督教徒及其《约瑟》（Yestas）、伊朗的琐罗亚斯德教徒及其《阿维斯塔》（Avesta），也同样被称为“有经人” （ahl al-kitāb），从而免于被迫改信伊斯兰教。

These distinctive scriptures, a totally closed set, are the great treasure of Islam, constantly pondered and declaimed by the faithful. Their existence seems to have been taken by Muslims as the badge of properly revealed religion, for in their domains holders of other revealed monotheistic faiths, Jews with their TaNaK, Christians with their Testaments, Zoroastrians in Iran with their Avesta, were called likewise ahl al-kitāb, ‘people of the book’, and thereby exempt from forcible conversion.

阿拉伯语闪电战对语言的影响，堪比九个世纪前希腊语席卷波斯疆域的迅猛发展。阿拉伯语的影响最终比希腊语的传播更为持久，但如同希腊语在东方的传播一样，阿拉伯语的普及程度也未能完全匹配推动其传播的世俗权力扩张。

The linguistic effects of the Arab blitzkrieg can only be compared with those of Greek’s wild ride throughout Persia’s domains nine centuries before. They were ultimately to be much more durable than the extension of Greek had been, but like the spread of Greek across the east, the take-up of Arabic did not quite measure up to the spread of temporal power that had caused its advance.

在政治上，阿拉伯人的征战摧毁了罗马帝国（当时的拜占庭帝国）对整个东地中海地区的控制——安纳托利亚地区除外。尽管他们试图攻占君士坦丁堡，但这座罗马的权力中心幸存了下来，并在基督教的抵抗下又延续了八个世纪。更往东，阿拉伯人占领了亚美尼亚，但并未使其皈依基督教。更重要的是，阿拉伯人终结了萨珊王朝在伊朗和阿富汗山区的统治。这标志着琐罗亚斯德教走向衰落的开始，它逐渐被伊斯兰教取代，成为大众信仰的一部分。如今，琐罗亚斯德教仅在极少数的帕西人中存续，而帕西人在三百年后逃往了印度。

Politically, the Arab campaigns destroyed the hold of the Roman, now Byzantine, empire on the whole of the eastern Mediterranean—excepting only Anatolia. Despite their efforts to take Constantinople, this centre of Roman power survived, and lived on in Christian defiance for another eight centuries. Farther east, the Arabs overran Armenia but did not convert it. More significant was the Arabs’ termination of Sassanian power in Iran and the mountains of Afghanistan. This was the beginning of the end for Zoroastrianism, gradually replaced in popular worship by Islam. Nowadays it survives only in the tiny minority of Parsees who were to flee to India three hundred years later.

从语言学角度来看，其直接影响与政治影响不相上下：无论伊斯兰教被接受还是被强加于何处，阿拉伯语都确立了其宗教语言的地位。在神圣领域，从未出现过任何竞争，因为伊斯兰教不像基督教那样寻求通俗易懂的语言，也不寻求翻译成其他语言。启示简洁明了，仅以阿拉伯语表达。此外，伊斯兰教坚持以阿拉伯语进行公开的祈祷仪式，宣礼员用阿拉伯语召唤信徒祈祷的声音始终贯穿于每个人的日常生活中。“真主至大”（Allāh akbar ）。

Linguistically, the immediate effects were comparable to the political ones: Arabic established itself as the language of religion, wherever Islam was accepted, or imposed. In the sphere of the holy, there was never any contest, since Islam unlike Christianity did not look for vernacular understanding, or seek translation into other languages. The revelation was simple, and expressed only in Arabic. Furthermore, Islam was a religion that insisted on public rituals of prayer in the language, and where the muezzin’s call of the faithful to prayer, in Arabic, has always punctuated everyone’s day. Allāh akbar, ‘God is greater.’

公元700年，大马士革的哈里发阿卜杜勒·马利克召见他的希腊顾问约翰内斯·达马斯库斯，告知他已决定从此禁止在所有公共行政中使用希腊语。这位顾问告诉他的同僚：“你们最好另谋生路：你们现在的职位已被真主剥夺。”之后，他便以僧侣的身份度过了余生（655-749）^。64

In 700, the caliph in Damascus, ‘Abd el Malik, summoned his Greek adviser, Joannes Damascenus, to tell him that he had decided henceforth to ban the Greek language from all public administration. The adviser told his colleagues: ‘You had better seek another profession to earn your living: your present employment has been withdrawn by God.’ He then spent the rest of his long life (655-749) as a monk.⁶⁴

这便是他们的愿景。然而在实践中，最初几代人，行政管理仍然沿用希腊语和波斯语等前身语言，在某种程度上也使用阿拉姆语和科普特语，这主要是因为征服者无力驾驭他们所夺取的繁复官僚体系，而且当时的人员招募方式大多是任人唯亲。文士阶层依然由同一批家族构成，但到了伊斯兰时代的第二个世纪，他们已经开始读写阿拉伯语。埃及的纸莎草文献记录了这一过程。穆斯林征服后的一个世纪里，所有文献都仍以希腊语书写；之后双语现象开始出现，但直到伊斯兰统治150年后，也就是公元8世纪末，阿拉伯语才完全取代希腊语。 ⁶⁵

This was the aspiration. In practice, for the first few generations administration lingered in the predecessor languages, Greek and Persian, to some extent Aramaic and Coptic, not least because the conquerors were unable to operate the elaborate bureaucratic systems they had seized, and because the methods of recruitment were mostly nepotistic. The same families continued to provide the scribal classes, but by the second century of the Muslim era they were reading and writing in Arabic. The process can be followed in the papyrus trail of Egypt. All documents remain in Greek for a good century after the Muslim conquest; then bilingualism sets in, but Arabic totally replaces Greek only in the late eighth century, after 150 years of Islam.⁶⁵

但如今，阿拉伯语仅在伊斯兰之家（Dār-al-islām ）内部的某个特定区域使用。是什么导致了它的衰落？从长远来看，阿拉伯语的成功，或者更确切地说是阿拉伯语的成功，受到一种微妙的语言限制。阿拉伯语从清真寺的语言发展成为通用语，但仅限于那些此前使用过某种相关语言的国家，这些语言属于亚非语系（或含闪语系）。^*

But Arabic is now spoken only in an inner zone within the Dār-al-islām, ‘House of Islam’, as a whole. What happened to roll it back? In the long term there was a subtle linguistic limit on Arab success, or rather on the success of Arabic. Arabic progressed from the language of the mosque to establish itself permanently as the common vernacular of the people only in countries that had previously spoken some related language, one that belonged to the Afro-Asiatic (or Hamito-Semitic) family.^*

这一亚非语系区域包括新月沃土，阿拉伯语在那里取代了阿拉姆语；埃及，阿拉伯语在那里压倒了科普特语；利比亚和突尼斯，阿拉伯语最终取代了柏柏尔语，并抹杀或融入了迦太基语；以及马格里布地区（今阿尔及利亚和摩洛哥北部），阿拉伯语也在那里将柏柏尔语驱赶到一些较小的区域。马耳他岛虽小，但其起源于迦太基帝国，带有迦太基语背景，在公元870年被阿拉伯人征服后，也开始使用阿拉伯语，这与它自公元前218年以来受罗马统治长达千年的事实形成鲜明对比。阿拉伯语持续扩张的区域还包括其边缘地带，以及稍晚一些的非洲南部地区，西至毛里塔尼亚，东至乍得和苏丹；阿拉伯语后来通过贸易往来传播，并取代了一些乍得语和库希特语。

This Afro-Asiatic zone included the Fertile Crescent, where Arabic replaced Aramaic; Egypt, where it overwhelmed Coptic; Libya and Tunisia, where it finally supplanted Berber and erased—or merged into—Punic; and the Maghreb (the north of modern Algeria and Morocco), where it also pushed Berber back into a set of smaller pockets. The tiny island of Malta, too, which had a Punic background from its origins in the Carthaginian empire, became Arabic-speaking after Arab conquest in 870 AD, belying its millennium of control from Rome since 218 BC. The area of permanent Arabic advance also included at the margin, and rather later, a more southerly zone in Africa, Mauritania in the west, and Chad and Sudan in the east; here Arabic spread later through trade contacts, and would have replaced some Chadic and Cushitic languages.

在阿拉伯语成为主要语言的所有这些地区，都出现了一种被称为“双语现象”的特征：一种古典阿拉伯语被用作精英阶层的方言，而不同的地方变体则在日常口语中广泛使用，这些变体之间的相互理解程度与欧洲的罗曼语族语言一样有限。古典阿拉伯语与《古兰经》的语言接近，但并不完全相同。

In all these regions where Arabic became the dominant language, a characteristic state of what is called ‘diglossia’ has set in, with a single classical form of Arabic used as an elite dialect, but different local varieties, no more mutually understandable than the Romance languages of Europe, established in everyday speech. Classical Arabic is close to, but not quite identical with, the language of the Qur’ān.

阿拉伯语传播受限的原因必然是社会语言学的，而不是政治、宗教或文化的，因为阿拉伯语适用的情况千差万别。

The explanation for the limit on the spread of Arabic must be sociolinguistic rather than political, religious or cultural, since the situations in which it applied were extremely various.

在阿契美尼德王朝、马其顿王朝、帕提亚王朝和萨珊王朝的统治下，伊朗曾是琐罗亚斯德教的骄傲堡垒长达一千多年。然而，从公元634年起，阿拉伯人在短短二十年间便将其彻底征服。此后，伊斯兰教逐渐在伊朗传播开来，尽管宗教叛乱一直持续到九世纪。伊朗随后成为伊斯兰教的中心，实际上是什叶派的堡垒，并一直保持着伊斯兰教的统治。

Iran, for over a thousand years under Achaemenids, Macedonians, Parthians and Sassanians, had been the proud fortress of Zoroastrianism. Nevertheless, it was totally subdued militarily by the Arabs in twenty years from 634. Gradually thereafter, the faith of Islam spread within it, although religious-inspired revolts were still happening well into the ninth century. It then became a heartland of Islam, in fact the stronghold of its Shia tradition, and has remained Muslim ever since.

到八世纪中叶，阿拉伯语已成为伊朗全国的官方语言，取代了帕提亚人在西部使用的巴列维语和在远东使用的粟特语。 ⁶⁶在早期，阿拉伯语-波斯语双语现象十分普遍，甚至在哈里发宫廷中也十分常见，尤其是在哈伦·拉希德（786-809 年）时期，他因出现在《一千零一夜》中而被奉为传奇人物。约卒于 869 年的贾希兹讲述了一位波斯智者诵读《古兰经》的故事，他用阿拉伯语向右边的人讲解，用波斯语向左边的人解释。来自波斯的诗人，如阿布·纳瓦斯和巴沙尔·本·布尔德，是阿拉伯文学史上的重要人物。⁶⁷波斯人在阿拉伯和叙利亚建立了殖民地。阿拉伯地理学家穆卡达西在九世纪末声称，当时最纯正的阿拉伯语是在伊朗东北部的呼罗珊地区使用的，因为那里的伊朗学者努力学习阿拉伯语。68在伊朗^的精英阶层中，阿拉伯语的普及程度几乎达到了普遍水平。

By the mid-eighth century the official language of the government all over Iran had become Arabic, replacing the Parthians’ languages of Pahlavi in the west, and Sogdian in the far east.⁶⁶ In the early period, Arabic-Persian bilingualism was widespread even at the court of the caliph, notably in the days of Harūn al-Rashid (786-809), who was made into a figure of legend by his appearances in The 1001 Nights. Al-Jahiz, who died c.869, tells of one Persian sage who used to read out the Qur’ān, explaining it in Arabic to those on his right, and in Persian to those on his left. Poets from Persia, such as Abu Nawas and Basshar bin Burd, were key figures in Arabic literary history.⁶⁷ There were Persian colonies settled in Arabia and Syria, and the Arab geographer al-Muqaddasi claimed at the end of the ninth century that the purest Arabic of his time was spoken in Khurasan, in north-eastern Iran, because the Iranian scholars there made such efforts to learn it correctly.⁶⁸ At the elite level, Arabic must have achieved almost universal coverage within Iran.

然而，阿拉伯语从未在伊朗任何地方成为日常用语。从某种意义上说，对伊朗阿拉伯语卓越性的强调恰恰暴露了这一点，因为它暗示阿拉伯语并未像在阿拉伯语世界其他地方那样，在伊朗扎根并形成其独特的方言特征。九世纪描述伊朗西部主要城镇的地理学家称，这些城镇的居民讲波斯语。伊本·豪卡尔指出，库姆城的所有居民都是什叶派穆斯林，而且大多是阿拉伯人；然而，他们都讲波斯语。具有讽刺意味的是，伊斯兰教的传播似乎促进了波斯语向东传播：八世纪^阿拉伯人在原先的佛教中亚地区的征服，使得波斯语得以传播，而当地语言，特别是粟特语，则逐渐式微。据推测，大部分军队来自伊朗东部，那里当时波斯语仍然是通用语。⁷⁰这就是为什么塔吉克斯坦和阿富汗西北部至今仍以波斯语为官方语言的原因。五百年后，当一支伊斯兰军队入侵印度，建立德里苏丹国时，它带来的却是波斯语而非阿拉伯语。

Yet Arabic never penetrated any part of Iran as a language of daily life. In a sense, the insistence on the excellence of the Arabic spoken in Iran gives this away, for it implies that Arabic was not taking root, and taking on its own character as a local dialect, as it did everywhere in the Arabic-speaking world. Geographers describing the major towns of the west in the ninth century say they were Persian-speaking. Ibn Hauqal states that the entire population of Qum was Shiite, and mostly Arab; nevertheless they all spoke Persian.⁶⁹ Ironically, the march of Islam seems to have supported the spread of Persian out to the east: the Arab conquests in what had been Buddhist central Asia in the eighth century spread Persian, at the expense of the local languages, especially Sogdian. Presumably most of the troops were from the east of Iran, where Persian was still the lingua franca.⁷⁰ That is why Tajikistan, and the north-western half of Afghanistan, is Persian-speaking to this day. And when five hundred years later an Islamic army penetrated into India beyond, and set up the Delhi Sultanate, it brought Persian rather than Arabic in its wake.

在伊斯兰教疆域的另一端，约6000公里之外的伊比利亚半岛，伊斯兰教凭借一支主要由皈依伊斯兰教的柏柏尔人组成的军队，以武力传播开来。在他们的领袖塔里克·本·齐亚德的带领下，他们于711年渡过直布罗陀海峡（吉卜勒·塔里克，意为“塔里克之山”），击败西哥特国王罗德里克后，成为了这片土地的统治者。（二十年后，他们曾试图从比利牛斯山脉以北发动一次大规模进攻，但在732年被击退，最远到达了法国中部的普瓦捷。）此后，穆斯林在西班牙和葡萄牙统治了750年；这片土地自称为安达卢斯，其历史就是不同埃米尔争夺统治权的历史，而科尔多瓦城尤其成为了整个伊斯兰世界的文化瑰宝之一，特别是作为阿拉伯诗歌的故乡。事实上，埃米尔阿卜杜勒·拉赫曼三世在929年自认为实力强大，自封为“信士的统帅” （Amir al-mu'minîn），即伊斯兰教的哈里发。然而，随着基督教国王在莱昂和纳瓦拉，以及后来的卡斯蒂利亚和阿拉贡的势力日益壮大，穆斯林的控制范围开始逐渐缩小。1085年托莱多陷落，引发了柏柏尔人阿尔摩拉维王朝的新一轮入侵，他们被召集来平衡基督教和伊斯兰教之间的力量。但短暂的平静之后，伊斯兰教的颓势依然持续：科尔多瓦于1236年陷落，塞维利亚于1248年陷落。“收复失地运动”最终在1492年以格拉纳达的陷落而告终。

Some 6000 kilometres away at the other end of Islam’s domains, in the Iberian peninsula, Islam had been spread at the point of a sword by an army made up mostly of converted Berbers. Under their leader, Tāriq bin Ziyād, they had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar (Jibl al-Tāriq, ‘the mountain of Tariq’) in 711, and after defeating the Visigothic king Roderik found themselves masters of the country. (They did attempt a major sortie north of the Pyrenees twenty years later, but were thrown back in 732, having got as far as Poitiers in central France.) Seven hundred and fifty years of Muslim presence in Spain and Portugal lay ahead; the country knew itself as el-Andalüs, its history was the story of different emirs contending for control, and the city of Cordoba especially became one of the cultural jewels of all Islam, especially as a home of Arabic poetry. Indeed, the emir ’ Abd al-Rahman III considered himself strong and magnificent enough in 929 to declare himself Amir al-mu ‘minîn, ‘Commander of the Faithful’, and so a pretending caliph of all Islam. Nevertheless, later the area of Muslim control began very gradually to be rolled back, as Christian kings grew stronger in Leon and Navarre, and later Castile and Aragon. Toledo fell in 1085, causing a new incursion of Berbers, the Almoravids, called in to redress the balance between Christian and Muslim. But after a respite, the tide continued to run against Islam: Cordoba fell in 1236 and Seville in 1248. The ’reconquista’ culminated in the capture of Granada in 1492.

在这段漫长的时期里，伊比利亚半岛必定是一个双语区——或许是三语区，因为一波又一波入侵的柏柏尔人仍然保留着自己的语言。有人认为，到十二世纪，西班牙语或其罗曼语族的前身在伊斯兰地区几乎已经消亡，取而代之的不是古典阿拉伯语，而是安达卢西亚阿拉伯语。安达卢西亚阿拉伯语的方言特征表明，这种语言已被当地人民认真地接受。的确，在基督教势力重返托莱多一个多世纪之后，仍然有大量的文件是用安达卢西亚语书写和公证的。安达卢西亚^{语专家费德里科·科连特写道：“双语现象迅速演变为单语现象，这一过程在十三世纪完成。但我们不应忘记，在十一、}^十二世纪，双语现象已经零星存在。”

During this long period Iberia must have been a bilingual zone—probably trilingual as long as waves of invading Berbers retained their own language. Some have claimed that Spanish, or its Romance forebear, had almost died out in the Islamic region by the twelfth century, replaced not by classical but by Andalusī Arabic, its dialectal nature showing that the language had been taken up in earnest by the people. Certainly, more than a century after the return of Christian power to Toledo, there were still large numbers of documents being written and notarised in Andalusi.⁷¹ Federico Corriente, an expert on Andalusi, has written: ‘Bilingualism evolves rapidly into monolingualism, a process that was complete in the 13th century, which must not make us forget that in the 11th and 12th centuries, the pockets of bilingualism were already residual.’⁷²

自1492年起，新政权采取行政和立法行动，旨在至少三代人的时间里消除阿拉伯语的使用。1501年和1511年，颁布法令禁止持有大部分阿拉伯语书籍；1511年，又颁布法令（但显然并未生效）规定阿拉伯语合同无效。1526年，查理五世仍需在枢密院下令，规定卡斯蒂利亚西班牙语只能用于合同和市场交易。甚至到了1566年，腓力二世仍颁布法令，规定三年内所有摩尔人（“摩里斯科人”）只能说卡斯蒂利亚语，不得说阿拉伯语。

Executive and legislative action was taken by the new power to eliminate Arabic speech for at least three generations after 1492. In 1501 and 1511 laws were passed against the possession of most Arabic books, and in 1511 it was decreed (apparently without effect) that contracts in Arabic would no longer be valid. In 1526 it was still necessary for Charles V to order in council that only Castilian Spanish would be spoken, used for contracts and in the marketplace. Even in 1566 Philip II was decreeing that within three years all Moors (’moriscos’) would be allowed to speak only Castilian and not Arabic.

因此，在波斯，阿拉伯语尽管拥有宗教威望，却始终无法撼动文化惯性；在西班牙，阿拉伯语虽然起初发展得更为成功，但最终还是屈服于政治、军事和宗教的压制。在北非的中间地带，情况则相对简单。阿拉伯语首先在城镇中扎根，早期其主要直接竞争对手是拉丁语——以及我们之前提到的，一定程度上的迦太基语。对于欣然接受伊斯兰教的柏柏尔人来说，阿拉伯语最初仅仅被视为伊斯兰教的语言。考虑到阿拉伯语在穆斯林教育中的作用，这产生了相当大的影响，尤其是在精英阶层开始将儿子送往东方学习神学和法律之后，这种影响更加显著。内陆的柏柏尔王国尽力维持着自身的独立，但没有任何证据表明他们曾试图摆脱伊斯兰教的统治。

In Persia, then, Arabic, despite its religious prestige, had been unable to overwhelm cultural inertia; in Spain, though much more successful at first, it had finally succumbed to political, military and religious suppression. In the intermediate zone of North Africa, the picture was rather simpler. Arabic established itself first in the towns, where its main immediate competitor in the early days was Latin—and to an extent, as we have seen, Punic. For the Berbers, who accepted Islam quite readily, Arabic was at first taken only as the language of the faith. This had quite an impact, given the role of Arabic in Muslim education, and more when members of the elite began to send their sons to the east to study theology and law. Berber kingdoms of the hinterland maintained their independence as best they could, but there is no evidence of any attempt to throw off Islam as such.

阿拉伯语似乎直到十世纪才真正取得进步，此前柏柏尔社会遭到野蛮游牧部落巴努·希拉勒（Banu Hilal）的蹂躏。 ⁷³ 巴努·希拉勒如同野狗一般，在各酋长国之间的争端中涌入马格里布地区。埃及的法蒂玛王朝希望他们能解决其昔日附庸齐里德王朝（Zirids）的烂摊子。齐里德王朝是一个柏柏尔部落，统治着突尼斯。两百年后，柏柏尔裔历史学家伊本·赫勒敦（Ibn Khaldün，其根源可追溯至安达卢斯）用阿拉伯语写道，他将他们比作“蝗虫群”：“大地似乎都改变了性质。阿拉伯人在过去几个世纪征服的所有土地，文明和人口都已消失殆尽……” ⁷⁴

It seems that Arabic only really made progress in the tenth century, after the devastation of Berber society at the hands of the Banu Hilal, a savage band of nomads.⁷³ These seem to have been set on Maghreb society like so many wild dogs in the course of a dispute between emirates, the Fatimids in Egypt hoping that they would settle the hash of their erstwhile vassals the Zirids, a Berber clan who ruled from Tunis. Ibn Khaldün, a historian of Berber stock (with roots in El Andalus), writing two hundred years later, in Arabic, likened them to ‘a swarm of locusts’: ‘The very earth seems to have changed its nature. All the lands that the Arabs have conquered in the last few centuries, civilization and population have departed from them …’⁷⁴

然而，这使得阿拉伯语城市能够在北非塑造这个新世界：“……当条件发生彻底改变时，就好像整个造物都发生了改变，整个世界都发生了转变，就好像出现了一个新的创造，一次重生，一个全新的世界诞生了。” ⁷⁵

However, this put the Arabic-speaking cities in a position to provide form to this new world in North Africa: ‘… when there is an entire alteration of conditions, it is as if the whole creation had been changed and all the world transformed, as if there were a new creation, a rebirth, a world brought into existence anew’.⁷⁵

柏柏尔人曾是北非的主要语言群体，如今却与遥远的地区和颠沛流离的生活联系在一起。然而，他们的语言依然存在，在巴努希拉尔人从未涉足的马格里布西部地区以及撒哈拉沙漠的图阿雷格游牧民族中最为盛行，尽管在地中海沿岸仍有相当数量的柏柏尔人使用。

The Berbers, once the dominant speech community all over North Africa, now became associated with distant regions, and a life unsettled. Their language lives on, though, strongest in the western area of the Maghreb, where the Banu Hilal never penetrated, and among the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara, although there are substantial pockets still along the Mediterranean.

最后，让我们来看看突厥人。这支游牧民族与阿拉伯语的接触并非源于被阿拉伯语使用者征服或劝诱，而是他们主动出击，征服了阿拉伯人。他们从东北方向而来，首先统治了穆斯林势力的东部地区，随后进军巴格达，最终控制了整个伊斯兰世界。征服之后，没有哪个民族能像突厥人那样虔诚地信奉伊斯兰教。尽管如此，他们在接受伊斯兰教的同时，仍然保留了自己的语言。

Finally, consider the Turks, nomad forces who came into contact with Arabic, not through being conquered by its speakers, or proselytised by them, but through taking the initiative and conquering them. Coming from the north-east, they first dominated the eastern areas of Muslim power, moved to take the centre in Baghdad, and later expanded to be in effective control of the whole Dār-al-islām. Once they had conquered, there were none to match the Turks in their adherence to the Muslim faith. Nevertheless, they held on to their language even as they accepted the religion.

此外，他们还产生了另一个语言影响：他们也削弱了阿拉伯语对整个波斯的控制。突厥人最初是通过中亚的波斯语地区接触到伊斯兰世界的。从某种意义上说，他们只能透过波斯语的面纱来了解伊斯兰世界。因此，当突厥人开始施加影响时，波斯语重新成为伊朗的官方行政语言，而阿拉伯语的使用范围则越来越局限于宗教领域。

And they had one other linguistic effect: they also slackened the grip of Arabic on Persia as a whole. The Turks had first encountered the world of Islam through the Persian-speaking area of central Asia. In a sense, they saw it only through a veil of Persian gauze. And so, when the Turks began to exercise influence, Persian returned as official administrative language to Iran, with Arabic restricted more and more to religious functions.

^{11世纪塞尔柱王朝*}全面掌控土耳其后，哈里发的精神职责与苏丹（名义上的保护者）的世俗权力之间的职能划分首次清晰地显现出来；苏丹依靠土耳其军队，但充分利用了精通波斯语的行政官员的专业知识。76即使突厥语民族皈依伊斯兰教^，阿拉伯语也无法在延伸至亚洲腹地的广袤土地上传播开来。他们已经拥有与新臣民沟通的通用语——波斯语。“毕竟，他们都说波斯语，不是吗？”阿拉伯语仅仅用于向上帝祈祷。^†

The advent of full Turkish control under the Seljuks^* in the eleventh century makes clear for the first time the emerging division of function between the spiritual responsibilities of the caliph and the temporal power of the sultan, his notional protector; the sultan relied on a Turkish army, but made full use of the Persian-speaking expertise of administrators.⁷⁶ Arabic was not going to spread across the expanse of Turkish-speaking peoples stretching out into the heart of Asia, even as they embraced Islam. They already had a lingua franca to use with their new subjects, and it was Persian. ‘After all, they all speak Persian, don’t they?’ Arabic was needed only to address God.^†

而这的确也成为了伊斯兰教在第二个千年进一步传播的模式，尤其是在撒哈拉以南的北非、从埃及和阿拉伯沿海岸南下至东非和马达加斯加、从巴格达和布哈拉进入西伯利亚和中亚、从阿富汗进入印度、从印度进入东南亚等地区：阿拉伯语被奉为神圣语言，但并没有成为通用语，甚至没有成为新穆斯林群体之间交流的通用语的趋势。除了西非的豪萨语使用者之外，其他皈依伊斯兰教的群体都不使用亚非语系语言；因此，这符合语言学上的限制^。

And this indeed was to be the pattern with all the further spreads of Islam that occurred in the second millennium, notably from North Africa south of the Sahara, from Egypt and Arabia down the coast to East Africa and Madagascar, from Baghdad and Bokhara into Siberia and central Asia, from Afghanistan into India, from India into South-East Asia: Arabic was accepted as a sacred language, but had no tendency to spread as a vernacular, or even as a lingua franca for contacts among the new Muslim populations. Except for the Hausa speakers of West Africa, none of the converted communities spoke Afro-Asiatic languages; so this conforms to the linguistic constraint.^*

在结束关于阿拉伯语传播及其局限性的讨论之前，有必要探讨阿拉伯语传播的另一种方式，而这种方式实际上并未发生。至少从公元1世纪初到15世纪欧洲探险家到来之前，已知阿拉伯水手（或许与波斯水手存在一些竞争）承担了近东与非洲和印度沿岸之间的大部分海上贸易。

Before leaving the subject of the spread of Arabic and its limits, it is right to consider one other way in which Arabic might have been expected to spread, but in fact did not. At least from the beginning of the first century AD to the advent of European adventurers in the fifteenth, it is known that Arab sailors, with perhaps some Persian competition, undertook most of the marine trade between the Near East and the coasts of Africa and India.

最早的记载可以追溯到公元一世纪，见于希腊航海指南《环游印度洋》（Períplous Thalássēs Eruthraías ）。

The first testimony dates from the first century AD, in the Greek guide for sailors Períplous Thalássēs Eruthraías, ‘Voyage Round the Indian Ocean’.

（§16）再往前航行两天，便到了阿扎尼亚大陆（东非）的最后一个集镇，名叫拉普塔（Rhapta）。它的名字来源于前面提到的缝合船（rháptōn ploiaríōn），船上盛产象牙和玳瑁。沿着这条海岸线，居住着一些身材高大、习性海盗的人，每个地方都有自己的首领。马法里特首领依据某种古老的权力统治着这里，使其臣服于阿拉伯半岛上第一个国家的统治之下。如今，穆扎人控制着这里，并派遣许多大型船只前往，船长和代理人都是阿拉伯人，他们熟悉当地居民，与他们通婚，并且了解整个海岸线，也懂当地语言……

(§16) Two days’ sail beyond there lies the very last market-town of the continent of Azania [East Africa], which is called Rhapta; which has its name from the sewed boats [rháptōn ploiaríōn] already mentioned; in which there is ivory in great quantity, and tortoise-shell. Along this coast live men of piratical habits, very tall, and under separate chiefs for each place. The Mapharitic chief governs it under some ancient right that subjects it to the sovereignty of the state that is become first in Arabia. And the people of Muza now hold it under his authority, and send thither many large ships; using Arab captains and agents, who are familiar with the natives and intermarry with them, and who know the whole coast and understand the language …

（§21）在这些地方之外，在海湾左岸的尽头，有一个名为穆扎的海岸小镇，它是依法设立的集镇，距离贝雷尼斯（拉斯巴纳斯）相当远，对于向南航行的人来说，大约有12000斯塔迪亚的距离。整个地方挤满了阿拉伯船主和水手，商业活动十分繁忙；因为他们与远岸以及巴里加扎（印度西部的布罗奇）进行贸易，并派遣自己的船只前往那里^。77

(§21) Beyond these places in a bay at the foot of the left side of the gulf, there is a place by the shore called Muza, a market-town established by law, distant altogether from Berenice [Ras Banas] for those sailing southward, about 12,000 stadia. And the whole place is crowded with Arab shipowners and seafaring men, and is busy with affairs of commerce; for they carry on a trade with the far-side coast and with Barygaza [Broach, in western India], sending their own ships there.⁷⁷

无论拉普塔（达累斯萨拉姆？）、穆扎（穆哈？）和马法里蒂斯（马阿菲尔？）位于何处，由此可见，阿拉伯人与印度洋两岸的贸易往来早在穆罕默德之前六百多年就已开始。此外，直到1500年，阿拉伯船只的船体都是缝合而成，而非钉合或榫接，这也是一个众所周知的特点。《一千零一夜^》中关于辛巴达航海家（实际上，他更像是一位海上商人而非水手）的故事，很大程度上源于阿拉伯的真实历史^。

Wherever Rhapta (Dar es Salaam?), Muza (al Mukha?) and Mapharitis (Ma’afir?) were, it is clear from this that Arab trade involvement with both sides of the Indian Ocean goes back for well over six hundred years before Muhammad. It is also a known feature of Arab ships, up until 1500, that their hulls were stitched together, not nailed or pegged.⁷⁸ The 1001 Nights’ stories of Sindbad the Sailor (in fact, more a maritime merchant than a sailor) had a strong basis in Arab fact.^*

这意味着，从莫桑比克到印度南部的马拉巴尔和科罗曼德尔半岛，印度洋沿岸的所有港口都曾听到过阿拉伯语。这无疑会对语言产生影响，至少在贸易术语的形成方面是如此。毕竟，这方面早有先例，正如我们所见，腓尼基语在地中海沿岸的传播就是明证；而近几个世纪以来，欧洲列强将各自的语言带到他们进行贸易的地区，也印证了这一点。贸易通常被认为是英语走上世界语言之路的首要因素^。

This means that Arabic would have been heard in all the ports along the shores of the Indian Ocean from Mozambique to Malabar and Coromandel in southern India. Surely this might have had a linguistic effect, at least in the creation of a trade jargon? There is, after all, ample precedent, both, as we have seen, in the way that Phoenician was spread round the Mediterranean, and in more recent centuries as European powers have brought their languages to the parts of the world where they went to trade. Trade is usually accounted the first factor that set English on the road to becoming a world language.^*

事实上，阿拉伯语对斯瓦希里语的影响仅存于东非，那里主要的班图语系语言斯瓦希里语深受阿拉伯语影响。它的名称就源自阿拉伯语“sawā il”，意为“海岸”。从斯瓦希里语到十，数字6、7和9都借自阿拉伯语：斯瓦希里语是sita、saba和tisa，而阿拉伯语则是sitta、sab'a和tis'a。与几乎所有其他班图语系语言不同，斯瓦希里语没有明显的声调，但它使用了一些其他班图语系语言中不存在的阿拉伯语发音，尤其区分了r和l，并使用辅音th[ θ ]、kh[ x ]及其浊音对应音dh[δ]和gh[γ]。

In fact, the only vestige of such influence from Arabic is found in East Africa, where Swahili, the major Bantu language, shows heavy signs of Arabic influence. Its very name is derived from Arabic sawāil, ‘coasts’. Counting up to ten, the numbers 6,7 and 9 are all borrowed from Arabic: Swahili sita, saba and tisa versus Arabic sitta, sab ’a and tis ’a. Unlike almost every other Bantu language, it has no distinctive tones, but it uses certain sounds from Arabic which are unknown in other Bantu languages, notably distinguishing between r and 1, and using the consonants th [θ], kh [x] and their voiced analogues dh [δ] and gh [γ].

尽管如此，它在许多方面仍然具有班图语的特征，例如塞音前有很多鼻音（-nd-、-ng-、-mb-、-nt-、-nk-、-mp-），有各种特殊的词缀来表示名词所指代的概念类型，动词上有大量的黏着性前缀，承担了在英语或阿拉伯语等语言中通常由代词、动词词形变化和助动词完成的大部分工作：例如，

Nevertheless, it remains in many ways characteristically Bantu, with lots of nasals before stops (-nd-, -ng-, -mb-, -nt-, -nk-, -mp-), a variety of special prefixes that show what type of concept is designated by a noun, and heavy agglutinative prefixing on its verbs, doing most of the work that would be done by pronouns, verb inflexions and auxiliaries in languages like English, or indeed Arabic: for example,

wa-zee ha-wa-ju-i a-li-ko-kwenda

人们-老人不-他们-不知道-他-过去-那里-去

people-oldster not-they-know-not he-past-there-go

老人们不知道他去了哪里。

The old men don’t know where he has gone.

据推测，班图语系从五大湖地区传播到桑给巴尔地区的时间^早于本世纪初，因此《佩里普卢斯》中提到的阿拉伯访客很可能已经掌握了该语言的早期版本。当欧洲人首次抵达此地时（葡萄牙人于1498年），斯瓦希里语仅在从索马里摩加迪沙到莫桑比克贝拉沿海岸线的一条狭长地带使用。该地区现存最古老的阿拉伯语铭文来自一座建于1107年的清真寺，显然，阿拉伯语曾被广泛用作贸易语言，并经常与其他现已消亡的语言混合使用。此外，可能也存在反向影响：据说阿拉伯半岛和伊拉克的一些沿海阿拉伯语方言也显示出斯瓦希里语的影响^。79

The reckoning is that the spread of Bantu languages from the Great Lakes region would have reached the Zanzibar^* area early in this millennium, so that an early version of the language may well have been learnt by the Arab visitors mentioned in the Períplous. When Europeans first arrived on the scene (the Portuguese in 1498), Swahili was spoken in a thin strip all along the coast from Mogadishu in Somalia to Beira in Mozambique. The oldest surviving Arabic inscription in the region is from a mosque built in 1107, and it is clear that Arabic was much used as a trade language here, often in mixtures with other languages that have since died out. There may also have been influence in the opposite direction: it is said that some coastal dialects of Arabic in Arabia and Iraq show signs of Swahili influence.⁷⁹

尽管如此，斯瓦希里语现在是坦桑尼亚和肯尼亚的官方语言，并在邻国乌干达、莫桑比克、卢旺达、布隆迪、刚果、马达加斯加和科摩罗广泛使用。自欧洲殖民者到来以来，它既是帝国的通用语，也曾作为奴隶贩子及其受害者的行话，扮演着不那么光彩的角色。尽管使用斯瓦希里语的人数众多（估计达4000万），但只有在桑给巴尔附近的岛屿和沿海地区，人们才将其作为母语学习。或许一如既往，绝大多数斯瓦希里语使用者（约占90%）都是在成年后才开始学习这门语言。如果没有阿拉伯贸易，就不会有我们今天所知的斯瓦希里语，但阿拉伯语对它的影响早已停止。

Be this as it may, Swahili is now the official language in the states of Tanzania and Kenya, and widely used in the neighbouring countries of Uganda, Mozambique, Rwanda, Burundi, the Congos, Madagascar and the Comoros. Since the advent of European colonists, it has played a major role as a lingua franca of empires, as well as a less honourable one as the argot of slave-traders and their victims. Despite the vast numbers who use it (estimated at 40 million), Swahili is learnt as a native language only on the islands and coast close to Zanzibar. Perhaps as always, the vast majority of its speakers (some 90 per cent) pick it up later in life. Without Arab trade there would have been no Swahili as we know it, but Arabic influence on it ceased long ago.

第三幕间奏：

突厥人和波斯人，伊斯兰的先锋

THIRD INTERLUDE:

TURKIC AND PERSIAN, OUTRIDERS OF ISLAM

Kalkip ta yerimden doğrulayim、derdim、

Yelesi-kara Kazihk atima bineyim、derdim、

Kalabalik Oğuz içine gireyim、derdim、

Ala-gözlü gelin alayim、derdim、

Kara yere ak otaklar dikeyim、derdim、

Yürüyüp oğulu ak gerdeğe göçüreyim、 derdim，

Muradina，maksuduna eri$sLtireyim，derdim，

Murada erdirmedin beni！

Kara ba$sLim ilenci tutsun，喀山，seni！^*

Kalkip ta yerimden doğrulayim, derdim,

Yelesi-kara Kazihk atima bineyim, derdim,

Kalabalik Oğuz içine gireyim, derdim,

Ala-gözlü gelin alayim, derdim,

Kara yere ak otaklar dikeyim, derdim,

Yürüyüp oğulu ak gerdeğe göçüreyim, derdim,

Muradina, maksuduna eri$sLtireyim, derdim,

Murada erdirmedin beni!

Kara ba$sLim ilenci tutsun, Kazan, seni!^*

我对自己说，让我离开座位，站起来；

我对自己说，让我骑上我的黑鬃卡兹利克马；

我对自己说，让我走进奥古兹人的人群；

我对自己说，让我找到一个栗色眼睛的儿媳；

我对自己说，让我在黑色的土地上搭起白色的帐篷；

我对自己说，让我牵着男孩的手走向他的新房；

我对自己说，让我带他去实现他的愿望，他的渴望。

你没有让我实现我的愿望，

愿黑发的诅咒降临到你身上，喀山！

I said to myself, let me get up from my seat and stand,

I said to myself, let me ride my black-maned Kazilik horse,

I said to myself, let me go among the throngs of Oghuz,

I said to myself, let me find a chestnut-eyed daughter-in-law,

I said to myself, let me pitch white tents on the black earth,

I said to myself, let me walk the boy to his bridal chamber,

I said to myself, let me bring him to his wish, to his desire,

You did not let me attain my wish,

May the dark head’s curse seize you, Kazan!

德德·科尔库特，囚犯乌尊的世系，卡赞贝之子

（一位母亲责骂她的丈夫在一次袭击中失去了他们的儿子）

Dede Korkut, The Lineage of Uzun the Prisoner, son of Kazan Bey

(A mother berates her husband for losing their son on a raid)

另外两种主要语言，突厥语（形式多样，但都与现代土耳其语非常接近）和波斯语，如今最广为人知的身份是伊斯兰文明的辅助语言。我们在阿拉伯语的历史中不得不赋予它们无关紧要的角色，但这并不公平：这两种语言都拥有引人入胜的历史，其历史可以追溯到一千年前，远早于它们的使用者皈依伊斯兰教的悲剧时刻，并且对它们过去和现在的文化特征都产生了同样重要的影响。

Two other major languages, Turkic (spoken in a variety of forms, but all fairly close to modern Turkish) and Persian, are now best known as the auxiliary languages of Islamic civilisation. We have had to give them walk-on roles in the history of Arabic, but unjustly: both have interesting histories which go back for a thousand years before their speakers’ fateful conversions to Islam, and have contributed equally to their characters today and in the past.

突厥语系语言的分布范围十分广阔，从蒙古西部一直延伸到爱琴海。公元三、四世纪，其使用者匈奴和塔布加奇人曾侵扰并征服中国；五世纪，他们以匈奴的名义横行北印度，以匈人的名义入侵东欧。公元451年，他们甚至短暂地跟随阿提拉的军队抵达法国。从六世纪到十一世纪，可萨人统治着从黑海到里海的俄罗斯南部地区。十三世纪初，成吉思汗麾下的军队以突厥语系士兵为主；1240年，他们作为金帐汗国的成员攻陷基辅，永久性地改变了俄罗斯的权力中心。（参见第十一章“俄罗斯的起源”，第426页。）其他突厥人，如塞尔柱人和后来的奥斯曼人，击败了拜占庭希腊人，并在11世纪至15世纪期间定居于整个安纳托利亚。16世纪，喀山和阿斯特拉罕的突厥语鞑靼人仍然被俄罗斯人视为其扩张的主要障碍，必须将其清除；到了18世纪，克里米亚的鞑靼人则成了俄罗斯扩张道路上的一大阻碍。

The Turkic languages spread out over a vast area from western Mongolia to the Aegean Sea. As Xiongnu and Tabgatch, their speakers had harried and overrun the Chinese in the third and fourth centuries AD; in the fifth they were terrorising northern India as the Hūa, and eastern Europe as Hunni. In 451 they even briefly rode to France with Attila. Khazars ruled the south of Russia from the Black Sea to the Caspian from the sixth century to the eleventh. Turkic-speaking recruits made up the majority of the armies of Genghis Khan the Mongol in the early thirteenth century, and as members of the Golden Horde it was they who sacked Kiev in 1240, permanently shifting the centre of Russian power. (See Chapter 11, ‘The origins of Russian’, p. 426.) Other Turks, the Seljuks and later the Ottomans, brought down the Byzantine Greeks, and settled all over Anatolia, from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century, the Turkic-speaking Tatars in Kazan’ and Astrakhan were still seen by the Russians as the major obstacle to their expansion, one that now needed to be dislodged; and in the eighteenth century it was the Tatars in the Crimea who were very much in the Russians’ way.

八、九世纪时，突厥人在外蒙古鄂尔浑河谷用他们自己创造的卢恩字母书写墓碑铭文。之后，他们又采用了粟特文字，并将其演变为中亚的竖体回鹘文字。十一世纪，他们与波斯人相遇，并从波斯人那里采用了阿拉伯字母，甚至还编写了波斯语词典和一首长篇教谕诗《吉祥之知》（ Kutadğū Bilig）。十四世纪，在波斯和撒马尔罕，一种被称为察合台语（以成吉思汗的次子察合台命名）的突厥语方言成为蒙古汗国宫廷的文化语言。1505年，莫卧儿王朝^的 ^第一位君主巴布尔从阿富汗南下征服印度时，他与士兵们交流时使用的就是这种语言，尽管他更喜欢用波斯语写作。

In the eighth and ninth centuries, Turks were writing funeral inscriptions in the Orkhon valley in Outer Mongolia in a runic alphabet of their own devising. Then they took up Sogdian writing, converting it into the vertical Uighur script of central Asia. In the eleventh century they encountered the Persians, and adopted Arabic script from them, even writing a dictionary of their language and a long didactic poem, the Kutadğū Bilig, ‘The Knowledge of Auspiciousness’. In fourteenth-century Persia and Samarkand, the form of Turkic known as Chagatay—after the second son of Genghis Khan—was the language of culture in courts of the Mongolian khans,⁸⁰ and when Babur, the first of the Mughals, swept down from Afghanistan to conquer India in 1505, this was the language he spoke to his men, even if he preferred to write in Persian.⁸¹

几乎可以公平地将巴布尔的做法视为20世纪之前奥斯曼土耳其语的精神。直到20世纪30年代阿塔图尔克试图改革土耳其语之前，官方土耳其语一直深受波斯文学的影响^。82

It would almost be fair to take Babur’s approach as the spirit of Ottoman Turkish up to the twentieth century. Official Turkish was always heavily infused with literary Persian finery until Atatürk’s attempts to reform it in the 1930s.⁸²

如果土耳其语值得单独介绍，那么它的文化“姐妹”波斯语（或称法尔西语）也同样值得。波斯语自公元前六世纪以来就是一种高度书面化的语言。时至今日，未经训练的西方人往往将波斯视为阿拉伯世界一个模糊不清的东部地区；然而，波斯语作为一种语言，与欧洲或北印度的语言的共同之处远多于与阿拉伯语或土耳其语的共同之处。尽管经过1200年的实践，西方人难以掌握的阿拉伯语语音区别，例如s、z、t、d与……的区别，以及'(alif)与'('ayn)的区别，对波斯语使用者来说也同样困难。波斯语中“是”一词仍然是ast，就像拉丁语est、德语ist、俄语yest y和梵语asti一样。

If Turkish deserves its own treatment, So does its cultural big sister, Persian, or Farsī, a highly literate language since the sixth century BC. TO this day, untutored Westerners tend to see Persia as rather an indistinct eastern part of the Arab world: yet Persian—as a language—has far more in common with languages of Europe or northern India than it does with Arabic or Turkish. Despite 1200 years of practice, the phonetic distinctions in Arabic which Westerners find hard to master, s, z, t, d versus , , , , and ’(alif) versus ’ (’ayn), are difficult for Persian speakers too. The Persian word for ‘is’ is still ast, like Latin est, German ist, Russian yesty and Sanskrit asti.

尽管在过去两千年里，阿拉伯语在伊朗从未停止使用，但其文化发展却因一系列政治挫折而受到压制和不利影响。首先，公元前六世纪，大流士决定将阿拉姆语定为波斯帝国的官方语言；公元前四世纪，波斯帝国被征服后，塞琉古王朝试图推行希腊语。从公元前140年起，帕提亚人和萨珊王朝重振了阿拉伯语的地位，使其延续了八个世纪。然而，公元七世纪伊斯兰势力的迅猛发展，使得阿拉伯语在宗教、学术和政治领域占据了长达三个世纪的特权地位。当时，文士们被要求“不得在公务中寻求异教徒的帮助”。 ⁸³

Although it is has never ceased to be spoken in Iran over the last two thousand years, culturally it has been unfortunate, overlaid and disadvantaged by a series of political setbacks. First, in the sixth century BC Darius decided to make Aramaic the official language of the Persian empire; in the fourth century BC, when the empire was conquered, the Seleucids tried to impose Greek. Parthians and Sassanids reasserted its self-esteem for eight centuries from 140 BC, but then came the phenomenal spread of Islamic forces in the seventh century AD, elevating Arabic into a privileged position in religion, scholarship and government for three centuries. ‘No assistance should be sought from pagans in office work,’ scribes were enjoined.⁸³

波斯语在十世纪开始复兴，但几乎立刻就被十一至十五世纪突厥语（名义上是蒙古语）的入侵所掩盖。尽管如此，波斯语仍然是一种享有盛誉的语言；而且，由于德里苏丹国及其后的莫卧儿王朝，波斯语也从十三世纪起成为印度行政的主要官方语言，直到十九世纪被英语取代。

A resurgence of Persian began in the tenth century, but it was overlaid almost at once by the Turkic-speaking (nominally Mongol) incursions in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Nevertheless, Persian remained a prestige language; and thanks to Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals who followed, Persian also became the principal official language of Indian administration, from the thirteenth century until it yielded to English in the nineteenth.

波斯语的近亲在中亚也发挥了重要作用。公元前一千年，斯基泰语曾通行于欧亚大陆的大部分草原地区。（如今它以奥塞梯语的形式存在，是高加索地区的一种语言。）公元一千年，塞族-于阇梨语是早期佛教的重要文化语言；而更西边的巴克特里亚语，在公元一至二世纪被贵霜王朝的国王们带到了北印度。以撒马尔罕为中心的粟特语，在八至十世纪是丝绸之路通往中国的通用语。（如今它以雅格诺比语的形式存在，至今仍在帕米尔高原地区使用。）

Persian’s relatives have also been highly significant in central Asia. Scythian had been spoken across most of the Eurasian steppes in the first millennium BC. (It survives as Ossetic, a language of the Caucasus.) In the first millennium AD, Śaka-Khotanese was an important cultural language of early Buddhism; and Bactrian, spoken farther west, was taken by the Kushāna kings across northern India in the first and second centuries AD. Sogdian, centred on Samarkand, was the lingua franca of the Silk Road to China in the eighth to the tenth centuries. (It survives as Yaghnobi, still spoken in the Pamir mountains.)

尽管波斯语的发展几经沉浮，但它至今仍在伊朗境外使用，例如在阿富汗北部（被称为达里语，意为“宫廷语言”），以及更远的塔吉克斯坦（被称为塔吉克语）。尽管波斯语使用者即使在自己的土地上也常常缺乏政治主导地位，但无论在何处，它始终是一种具有崇高文化声望的语言，尤其以其诗歌而闻名。

For all its ups and downs, Persian is still spoken beyond the borders of Iran in the northern half of Afghanistan (as Darī, ‘courtly’), and beyond that in Tajikistan (as Tajik). And despite its speakers’ frequent lack of political dominance even in their own lands, wherever it is known it has always remained a language of high cultural prestige, famed particularly for its poetry.

有三样东西模仿了你的三样——

脸颊上的玫瑰，唇上的葡萄，脸上的美丽。

每年有三样东西源自我的三样——

心中的悲伤，脸颊上的泪水，眼中的幻想。

Three things have modelled themselves on three of yours –

Rose on cheek, grape on lip, beauty on face.

Three things each year are taken from three of mine –

Grief from heart, tears from cheek, fancy from eye.

阿布·卡西姆·温苏里（Abul Qasim 'Unsuri）（约公元968 年，中亚巴尔赫；约公元1040 年）

Abul Qasim ‘Unsuri (b. c.968 in Balkh, central Asia; d. c.1040 AD)

中东遗产：

沙漠游牧民族的魅力

A Middle Eastern inheritance:

The glamour of the desert nomad

当今全球化的世界充斥着阿拉伯语。欧美那些潜在的伊斯兰革命者觉得，他们必须学习阿拉伯语，才能使他们的斗争显得真实可信；而它与在迦南地复兴的希伯来语之间那讽刺的相似之处，时刻提醒着人们，最惨烈的冲突是如何让失散多年的表亲反目成仇的：阿拉伯语的“salām”与“šəlōm”相互争斗，但“和平”这一共同含义却始终难以达成共识。与此同时，这门古典语言仍然每天在穆斯林的祈祷中被吟诵，并通过广播传遍全球，拥有超过两亿的听众，而所有这些人，尽管彼此的交流方式千差万别，却都认为自己是在说阿拉伯语，即“arabīya”。

The present-day globalised world is full of Arabic. It is the language that would-be Islamist revolutionaries in Europe and the USA feel they have to learn to give authenticity to their struggle; and its ironic similarity to Hebrew, newly revived in the land of Canaan, is a standing reminder of how the bitterest conflicts set long-lost cousins at each other’s throats: salām contends against šəlōm, but the common meaning, ‘peace’, continues to elude them. Meanwhile the classical language is still intoned every day in Muslim prayer, and broadcast to an audience of well over 200 million souls, all of whom think when they converse, in their very different ways, that they are talking Arabic, ’arabīya.

它们都继承了大规模、统一的闪米特语系语言的传统，而这些语言的传统可以追溯到五千年前，这一点已得到证实。在这段漫长的岁月中，涌现出了许多创新的契机；世界见证了它们传统中首次将外语作为文学经典范式的运用，首次出现可多语使用的书写系统，首次成为国际外交的通用语，首次建立档案图书馆，首次出现字母文字，首次通过贸易殖民地传播语言，首次在不破坏单一书面传统的前提下用一种语言替代另一种语言，首次将某种语言用作少数宗教派别的护身符，以及首次将特定语言的书面记录奉为上帝永恒不变的圣言。

The language tradition of large-scale, unitary Semitic languages to which they are all heirs goes back demonstrably for five thousand years. In that time, there has been opportunity for a lot of innovations; the world has seen in their tradition the first adoption of a foreign language as a classic model for literature, the first system of writing with multilingual application, the first lingua franca of international diplomacy, the first archival libraries, the first alphabetic scripts, the first spread of language through trading colonies, the first substitution of one language for another without breakdown of a single literate tradition, the first use of a language as the talisman of a minority religious sect, the first designation of the written record of a particular language as the unchangeable word of God.

对于一个语言传统而言，这已是相当辉煌的“第一”记录，即便其主导语言曾两次被取代，或者更确切地说，两次被更新。我们将在其他地方探讨所有这些例子在人类语言系统发展总体模式中的意义。

That is a fair record of firsts for a single tradition, even if its dominant language has twice been replaced, or, to put it perhaps better, renewed. We shall consider elsewhere the significance of all these examples in the general pattern of the development of human language systems.

最后，我们可以思考一下，这种古老的传统是否存在某种独特的特征延续性。阿拉伯语与阿拉姆语和阿卡德语之间是否存在某种共通之处？或者，从遥远的古代、中世纪到现代，如此多的创新是否已经抹去了任何共同的核心？

An appropriate final reflection here might be to consider whether there is any distinctive continuity of character in this ancient tradition. Is there something about Arabic which it shares with Aramaic and Akkadian? Or have so many innovations, on the way through remote antiquity and the Middle Ages into the modern world, in effect revised away any common core?

费尔南·布罗代尔认为，穆斯林扩张的全面成功——如此突然且看似无法解释——是近东传统在希腊罗马中断一千年后自然而然的复兴。 ⁸⁴他认为阿拉伯语是各国真正属于穆斯林文明的最有力证明， ⁸⁵然而，他所举出的近东文明延续性的例子——服饰、饮食、民居建筑，甚至一神论信仰——都与语言无关。 ⁸⁶

Fernand Braudel saw in the total success of Muslim advance, so sudden and apparently so inexplicable, the natural reassertion of the Near Eastern tradition, after a Greek and Roman interruption of a thousand years.⁸⁴ He did see the Arabic language as the surest proof that countries are truly part of Muslim civilisation,⁸⁵ yet the examples he gives of continuity in Near Eastern civilisation—dress, food, domestic architecture, even monotheistic faith—have nothing to do with language.⁸⁶

最显而易见的是，伊斯兰教所宣扬的价值观与伟大的帝国主义先祖亚述人所信奉的价值观截然相反。穆斯林提出他们独特的上帝观，以此作为接受其统治的理由，并始终强调上帝无限的慈悲。亚述军队横扫邻国，以彰显其君主的强大，并通过残暴的暴行来展示其权力。他们的神灵也随之而来，即便许多人选择崇拜这些神灵，这仅仅是对所代表的一切更强大力量的一种认可，一种审慎和外交手段，而非对启示的接受或真诚的臣服。

At the most obvious level, the values promoted in Islam are the polar opposite of what their great imperialist predecessors the Assyrians embraced. The Muslims put forward their unique conception of God as a reason to accept their rule, emphasising all the while His infinite compassion. The Assyrian armies rolled over their neighbours to prove the greater might of their kings, and demonstrated their power through orgies of ruthlessness. Their gods followed, and if many chose to worship them, this was purely an acknowledgement of the greater power of all they stood for, an act of prudence and diplomacy, not the acceptance of a revelation or an act of sincere submission.

事实上，为伊斯兰教而战的阿拉伯人，可以被视为三种截然不同的闪米特语系民族传统的融合体：犹太教的抽象神学、阿拉姆基督教的包容性以及亚述人的军事力量。的确，如果将他们擅长远航和投机贸易的倾向也考虑在内，他们甚至可以与腓尼基人相提并论。

The Arabs going into battle for Islam can be seen in fact as an alloy of three very different preceding traditions among their fellow-speakers of Semitic languages: the abstract theology of the Jews, the embracing inclusiveness of the Aramaic Christians, and the military momentum of the Assyrians. Indeed, if one includes their propensity for long-distance navigation and speculative trading, they can also be ranged with the Phoenicians.

但无论信奉何种宗教，无论生活水平如何，闪米特人都有一点文化背景上的共通之处。无论他们的城市多么繁荣，无论他们的宗教和哲学多么发达，他们都无法摆脱自己起源于沙漠游牧民族的记忆。阿拉伯语是游牧民族的语言，伊斯兰教的创立也源于阿拉伯游牧民族的入侵。阿拉姆语通过来自亚兰的游牧民族的迁徙渗透到亚述和巴比伦帝国，并最终得以确立。希伯来人和腓尼基人在哈比鲁游牧民族最终定居迦南地后，发展了他们的城市和文化；《托拉》明确记载了以色列人在西奈旷野漂流四十年的故事。而如果没有鲜为人知的西方游牧民族——阿摩利人的入侵，阿卡德人或许永远无法取代苏美尔人的地位。归根结底，肯定是游牧民族在史前时期将闪米特语从非洲带到了新月沃土。

But there is one thing in the cultural background which does unite all the Semites, of whatever religion or desired level of opulence. However successful their cities, however developed their religions and philosophies, they never escaped the memory that they had all arisen from desert nomads. Arabic was the language of nomads, and Islam was founded by nomad aggression from Arabia. Aramaic penetrated the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, and so became established, through nomads spreading from Aram. The Hebrews and Phoenicians developed their cities and their cultures when Habiru nomads had finally settled down in the land of Canaan; explicitly, the Torah talks of the children of Israel wandering through the wilderness of Sinai for forty years. And the Akkadians might never have taken over from Sumer without the incursions of those little-known nomads of the west, the Amorites. Ultimately, surely, it must have been nomads who brought the Semitic languages in prehistoric times out of Africa and into the Fertile Crescent.

在现代闪米特世界，游牧民族或许难觅踪迹。但游牧的某些方面仍然是阿拉伯人尚未解决的问题的核心：巴勒斯坦人的无家可归，阿拉伯沙漠荒漠中涌现的不劳而获的财富所带来的道德不安，以及基地组织成员自我流放却仍在策划摧毁罪恶之城的野蛮行径。在所有这些问题上，阿拉伯语使用者都非常忠于他们的传统。事实上，阿卡德语、腓尼基语、阿拉姆语和阿拉伯语的历史，五千年来都在见证着沙漠的益处——它既是人们的家园，也是人们的出路。

Nomads may be hard to find in the modern Semitic world. But aspects of nomadism are still central to the unsolved problems of the Arabs: the home-lessness of the Palestinians, the moral queasiness about the unearned riches welling up from the desert wastes of Arabia, the wild men of al-Qa’eda in self-imposed exile while they plan destruction for the iniquitous cities. In all this, speakers of Arabic are very true to their tradition. Indeed, the histories of Akkadian, Phoenician, Aramaic and Arabic are a five-thousand-year demonstration of the benefits of the desert—as a place to come in from.

^*该家族以诺亚的第二个儿子闪（Shem）的名字命名，闪在《创世记》9:18中被提及。这种语言学上的用法可以追溯到1781年A.L. Schloezer的著作。他的灵感来源于《创世记》10:21-31中提到的许多闪的后裔都说这个语系的语言，特别是希伯来语（经由亚法撒传入）、亚述语和亚兰语。但这个名称并不恰当：闪的儿子中还有以拦和路德，他们分别是以拦语和吕底亚语的始祖，而这两种语言之间并无关联；迦南（西顿人、亚摩利人和亚罗底人的始祖）和宁录（巴比伦人和阿卡德人的始祖）被认为是含的后裔，尽管他们的语言实际上与希伯来语、亚述语和亚兰语密切相关。

^* The family is named after Noah’s second son, Shem, introduced in Genesis ix.18, and the linguistic use goes back to A. L. Schloezer, writing in 1781. He drew his inspiration from the fact that many of the peoples named as the descendants of Shem in Genesis x.21-31 spoke languages of this family, notably Hebrew (coming via Arphaxad), Asshur and Aram. But the term is not well chosen: Shem also had among his sons Elam and Lud, the patriarchs for Elamite and Lydian, which are quite unrelated languages; and Canaan (first of the Sidonians, as well as Amorites and Arwadites) and Nimrod (first of the Babylonians and Akkadians) are given as descendants of Ham, though their languages are in fact closely related to Hebrew, Assyrian and Aramaic.

^*最早的闪米特语名称（实际上来自阿卡德语）出现得更早，在公元前 2800 年左右的苏美尔文献中（Caplice 1988: 3）。

^*The first Semitic names (in fact from Akkadian) appear even earlier, in Sumerian documents c.2800 BC (Caplice 1988: 3).

^† š 的发音类似于英语中的“sh”，h 的发音类似于对着玻璃杯吹气时产生的音，θ 的发音类似于英语单词“th”中的“th” ，' 的发音类似于清嗓子的声音，ā 的发音类似于英语单词“father”中的长“a”，ē 的发音类似于英语单词“Beethoven”中的长“e”。

^†Pronounce š as English ‘sh’, h as the sound for blowing on glasses to mist them, θ as English ‘th’ in thin, ‘ as the clearing of a throat, ā as a long ‘a’ as in father, and ē as the long ‘e’ in Beethoven.

^希腊人出现得太晚，对这些早期起源一无所知，他们称这片土地为美索不达米亚，意为“河中之地”，强调幼发拉底河和底格里斯河（希腊语分别对应普拉图和伊迪克拉特）在该地区的核心地位。但在早期，幼发拉底河更为重要，它流经巴比伦和乌尔，滋养着阿卡德和苏美尔的土地。底格里斯河位于更东边，随着亚述的崛起而日益重要。“亚述”是希腊人对亚述的命名。

^*The Greeks, on the scene too late to know any of these early origins, called the place Mesopotamia, ‘Mid-River-land’, emphasising the framing role of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, Greek versions of the names Purattu and Idiqlat. But in this early period the Euphrates is much more central, flowing through Babylon and Ur, and watering the lands of both Akkad and Sumer. The Tigris, farther to the east, grows in importance with the rise of Assyria. ‘Assyria’ is the Greek attempt to name Asshur.

^赫梯（源自希伯来语ittī）这个名字来源于他们的权力中心哈梯（Hatti），那里的原住民说的是一种与赫梯语截然不同的语言，也叫哈梯语。事实上，赫梯人称他们的语言为尼西亚语（ nešili），取自他们的城市尼沙什（Nešaš，或称卡内什，即今天的土耳其东南部库尔特佩），但圣经中误称的“赫梯语”却一直沿用至今。

^*The name Hittite (from the Hebrew ittī) comes from their power centre in the land of Hatti, where the natives spoke a quite unrelated language, Hattic. The Hittites in fact called their language Nesian (nešili), after their city of Nešaš (or Kanesh, modern Kültepe, in south-eastern Turkey) but the biblical misnomer ‘Hittite’ has stuck.

^†吕底亚最后一位富可敌国的国王克罗伊斯于公元前 547 年被波斯人居鲁士击败。从语言学角度来看，这标志着赫梯帝国的最终衰落。

^†Croesus, the proverbially rich last king of Lydia, fell to Cyrus the Persian in 547 BC. Linguistically, this was the ultimate death rattle of Hittite power.

^这是他的希伯来语名字。他的真名是图库尔提-阿皮尔-埃沙拉（Tukulti-apil-Esharra），意思是“我信赖埃沙拉之子”，即亚述神亚述。穆什基人（Mushki）被伊戈尔·迪亚科诺夫（Igor Diakonov）等同于米西亚人（Mysians，色雷斯人定居于安纳托利亚西部），以及亚美尼亚人（格鲁吉亚人称之为萨梅基人Sa-mekhi）。《圣经》也提到米设是外邦人。

^*This is his name in Hebrew. His real name was Tukulti-apil-Esharra, meaning ‘my trust is in the son of Esharra’, namely the Assyrian god Asshur. The Mushki are equated b55555tty Igor Diakonov with the Mysians, Thracian settlers in western Anatolia, and also the Armenians, named Sa-mekhi by the Georgians. The Bible also speaks of Meshech as a foreign people.

^*菲尼克斯人，尤其是西顿人，在《伊利亚特》中以精湛的纺织和金属工艺而闻名，在《奥德赛》中则以旅行商人而闻名。

^*The Phoinîkes, especially the Sidonians, are renowned in the Iliad for fine weaving and metalwork, and in the Odyssey as travelling merchants.

在韦尔瓦附近的里奥廷托银矿，有600万吨古代矿渣，覆盖了四分之三平方公里的土地（很可能是塔尔特索斯遗址，据信与希伯来语中的塔什什相同）。尽管这种大规模的采矿活动持续了数个世纪，但考古证据倾向于表明，西班牙的腓尼基人定居点是商业飞地，而不是城镇（Markoe 2000: 182-6）^。

^*There are 6 million tons of ancient slag, covering 3/4 of a square kilometre, at the silver mines of Rio Tinto, near Huelva (probably the site of Tartessos, believed to be the same as Tarshish in Hebrew). Despite this massive activity, extending over centuries, archaeological evidence tends to show that Phoenician settlements in Spain were commercial enclaves rather than towns (Markoe 2000: 182-6).

^†另一种在亚洲另一端发明的表意文字系统也产生了类似的影响。日语、韩语和越南语都是通过使用汉字而实现文字化的，它们从汉语中吸收了大量的语言（和文化）元素，这些元素至今仍然普遍存在。

^†Another ideographic system, invented at the other end of Asia, had similar effects. The Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, all of which became literate through the use of Chinese characters, have sustained major linguistic (and cultural) borrowings from Chinese which are by and large still present today.

^唯一的例外是巴克特里亚语，它后来成为贵霜帝国（公元1至2世纪）的官方语言，使用希腊字母书写。这表明，远东地区独立的希腊王朝（尽管贵霜帝国最终取代了它们）的文化影响深远。

^*The one exception is Bactrian, later to become the language of the Kushāna empire (first to second centuries AD), written in the Greek alphabet. This shows the lasting cultural influence of the independent Greek dynasties in the far east, whom the Kushāna supplanted.

^*而这正是我们对数字符号（无论是阿拉伯数字还是罗马数字）的处理方式。

^* And this is precisely what we do with our number symbols, whether Arabic or Roman.

^阿摩利人没有自己的文字传统，但通过其他语言（通常是苏美尔语）中引用他们的名字，可以部分地重构他们的语言。这为后来的西闪米特语系语言（如乌加里特语、腓尼基语和希伯来语）建立了联系，而这些语言在五百多年后才出现在书面记录中。由于他们倾向于使用完整的句子来命名，因此这些名字比人们预想的更能展现阿摩利人的语言全貌： Aya-dadu，“达杜在哪里？”， Šūb-addu，“回来吧，阿杜！”， Yašub-'ilu，“神回来了”， Samsu-'ilu-na，“太阳是我们的神”。

^*The Amorites did not have their own literate tradition, but their language can be partially reconstructed when their names are quoted in other languages, usually Sumerian. This provides a link with the later western Semitic languages, such as Ugaritic, Phoenician and Hebrew, which do not show up in the written record for another five hundred years or more. Since there was a tendency to assign names that are full sentences, they give a fuller picture of the language than might have been expected: Aya-dadu, ‘Where is Daddu?’, Šūb-addu, ‘Return, Addu!’, Yašub-’ilu, ‘God returns’, Samsu-’ilu-na, ‘The Sun is our god.’

^*毕竟，公元第一个千年，盎格鲁人、撒克逊人、朱特人和丹麦人等各个部落与弗里斯兰人一起定居在不列颠，他们的经历正是如此。与弗里斯兰语最为接近的中古英语，便是由此而来。

^*This, after all, is exactly what happened to the various tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes who settled along with Frisians in Britain in the first millennium AD. Middle English, closest to Frisian, was the result.

^*六个世纪后，巴比伦仍有一些顽固分子在泥板上书写阿卡德语。

^* In Babylon some diehards were still writing Akkadian on clay six centuries later.

^*巧合的是，我们最后一次听到有关阿卡德语的消息，是一位公元二世纪用希腊语写作的叙利亚小说家：扬布利科斯（其名字很奇特，显然是阿拉姆语或阿拉伯语， ya-mlik，意为“愿他统治”）说他从巴比伦老师那里学会了“巴比伦语”，这位老师“精通蛮族的智慧”。（此消息的第三手资料来源可追溯到斯蒂芬斯和温克勒1995年著作第181页。）

^*As it happens, the last we hear about Akkadian is from a Syrian novelist writing in Greek in the second century AD: Iamblikhos (whose strange name is evidently Aramaic or Arabic, ya-mlik, ‘may he rule’) said he had learnt ‘Babylonian’ from his Babylonian tutor, a man ‘learned in the wisdom of the barbarians’. (The third-hand source for this can be traced from Stephens and Winkler 1995:181.)

^†希伯来语和腓尼基语的拼写中体现了其语法的一些复杂性：大多数塞音在词中发音为擦音。在我们的罗马化拼写中，我们用下划线或上划线来表示这一点：因此，v、t、g、p分别发音为v、th（如then中的 th ）、 gh（一种含糊不清的声音）、 ch（如loch中的 ch ）、 f、th（如thin中的th）。在腓尼基语、希伯来语和阿拉伯语中，s、t 和 d 下方的点表示它们要“重读”，使其发音略带沉闷、喉音。

^†Hebrew and Phoenician include some of the complexities of their grammar in their spelling: most of the stop consonants are pronounced as fricatives in the middle of a word. In our romanisation, we represent this with an under- or overline: thus , , g, , p, are pronounced v, th (as in then), gh (a gargling sound), ch (as in loch),f, th (as in thin). Dots under s, t and d in Phoenician, Hebrew and Arabic mean that they are pronounced ‘emphatically’, giving them a somewhat dull, throaty quality.

关于希腊人为何选择“phoinīkes”一词来指代这些四处游荡的闪米特商人，至今仍未达成共识。该词字面意思是“枣椰树”（或者指神话中的凤凰），但人们始终将其与“phoinos”或“phoinios”（意为“血红的”）联系起来^，因为腓尼基人是紫色织物的主要供应商，并且大规模养殖染料的原料——骨螺。这种颜色与世界这一地区的联系远不止于希腊语：阿卡德语中表示“紫色”的词是“kina u”，源自地名“Kina (n)I” ，意为“迦南”（Black et al. 2000: sv）。尽管希伯来人自己也居住在迦南，但他们使用“kəna 'aniy”一词，就像希腊人使用“phoinix”一样，泛指腓尼基人或商人。这似乎就是腓尼基人对自己的称呼。

^*Agreement has never been reached on why the Greeks picked on phoinīkes as their word for these roaming Semitic traders. Literally it means ‘date palms’ (or indeed the mythical phoenix birds), but the association with phoinos or phoinios, ‘gory, blood red’, was always kept in mind, since the Phoenicians were the purveyors par excellence of purple-dyed fabrics, and farmed the dye’s raw material, murex shellfish, on an industrial scale. The association of the colour with this part of the world goes beyond Greek: the Akkadian word for ‘purple’ was kinau, derived from the place name Kina (n)I, ‘Canaan’ (Black et al. 2000: s.v.). Although the Hebrews lived in Canaan themselves, they used the word kəna ‘aniy, as Greeks did phoinix, to refer indifferently to a Phoenician or a merchant; and this seems to be what the Phoenicians called themselves.

^这就是著名的《塔纳赫》（ Tôrāh N i'îm wa-Ks ū îm，意为“律法、先知和经文”）。除此之外，还有对《托拉》的注释《密释纳》（公元前200年至公元200年）、补充经卷《托塞夫塔》（公元300年）以及对《塔纳赫》逐节注释的《米德拉什》（公元200年至600年）。这些都表明，希伯来语不仅被阅读，也被书写。

^* This is known as the TaNaK(for Tôrāh Ni’îm wa-Ksūîm, ‘Law, Prophets and Scriptures’). But besides that there is the commentary on the Torah known as the Mishnah (200 BC-AD 200), the supplement known as Tosephta (AD 300), and a verse-by-verse commentary on the TaNaK, known as the Midrash (AD 200-600). These show that Hebrew continued to be written as well as read.

^{它被刻写在泥板上，因此得以保存至今。但}它使用的字母基于楔形文字，因此从图形上看，它也为腓尼基人——此前一直被认为是第一个使用字母的民族——提供了有趣的视角。腓尼基字母的形状较为简单，是因为它们通常是用墨水写在纸莎草纸上，而不是用倾斜的笔尖在泥板上印刻。

^* It was written on clay tablets; this is why it survived. But it was incised in an alphabet based on cuneiform, so graphically too it throws an interesting light on the Phoenicians, until then reputed to have been the first to use an alphabet. The simpler shapes of the Phoenician letters are due to their usually being written with ink on papyrus, rather than stamped with an angled stylus on clay.

^† El 只是“神”的闪米特语词根，在希伯来语elohīm中也有出现，这是《创世记》中表示神的两个词之一，在阿拉伯语Al-lah 中也有出现，字面意思是“神”。

^†El is simply the Semitic root for ‘god’, seen also in Hebrew elohīm, one of the two words for God in Genesis, and Arabic Al-lah, literally “The God’.

^*这首诗继续列举了所有主要客户国的特色产品：他施（金属）；希腊、土巴、米设（奴隶、青铜器）；伯特·托迦玛（马匹）；罗德岛（象牙和乌木）；亚兰（绿松石、精布、珊瑚和红宝石）；犹大和以色列（小麦、蜂蜜、油和香膏）；大马士革（葡萄酒、羊毛）；但人、乌扎尔的希腊人（锻铁、桂皮、菖蒲）；底但（鞍毯）；阿拉伯、基大（绵羊和山羊）；示巴、拉玛（香料、宝石、黄金）；哈兰、迦尼、伊甸、亚述、基勒麦德（衣服、布料、打结地毯）。

^* The poem continues with listings of characteristic products for all the major client nations: Tarshish (metals); Greece, Tubal, Meshech (slaves, bronze working); Beth Togarmah (equines); Rhodes (ivory and ebony); Aram (turquoise, fine cloth, coral and rubies); Judah and Israel (wheat, honey, oil and balm); Damascus (wine, wool); Danites, Greeks of Uzal (wrought iron, cassia, calamus); Dedan (saddle blankets); Arabia, Kedah (sheep and goats); Sheba, Raamah (spices, gems, gold); Haran, Canneh, Eden, Asshur, Kilmad (clothes, fabric, knotted rugs).

^埃利马姆（1977）认为，布匿语的故事结局更为美好，而且布匿语至今仍然存在，是马格里布“阿拉伯语”（马格里布在阿拉伯语中意为“西方”）的祖先。诚然，这种通常被认为是阿拉伯语方言的闪米特语与《古兰经》的古典阿拉伯语存在显著差异；但这在所有阿拉伯方言中都是如此。在罗马时期之后，布匿语在某些地区得以延续，很可能对马格里布语产生了重大影响。遗憾的是，由于关于布匿语真实面貌的证据有限，我们很难确定这种影响的程度。埃利马姆本人根据《波努鲁斯》中最长的布匿语演讲（十行，八十二个词）推测，布匿语与马格里布语有62%的共同之处，另有18%经历了语义演变。

^* Elimam (1977) suggests that the Punic story had a happier ending, and that Punic is still alive today, as the ancestor of Maghrebi ‘Arabic’ (maghreb is Arabic for ‘west’). It is certainly true that this Semitic language, usually characterised as a dialect of Arabic, diverges strongly from the classic language of the Koran; but this is true of all the Arab vernaculars. Where Punic did survive after the Roman period, it would very likely have made a significant contribution to Maghrebi. Unfortunately, the restricted evidence of what Punic was really like makes it hard to know to what extent this happened. Elimam himself suggests, on the basis of the longest Punic speech in Poenulus (ten lines, eighty-two words), that Punic has 62 per cent in common with Maghrebi, and a further 18 per cent has undergone some semantic evolution.

^*这次回归在圣经的《以斯拉记》和《尼希米记》中有详尽的记载。这两卷书是用希伯来文写成的，但与政府的大部分通信是用亚兰文写的（《以斯拉记》4:8-6:18 和 7:12-26）。令人惊叹的是，在消失两千五百年之后，希伯来语如今再次成为耶路撒冷街头的通用语，这充分展现了有意识地维护的传统所具有的强大生命力。

^* The return is recorded at length in the books Ezra and Nehemiah of the Bible. They are in Hebrew, though much of the correspondence with the government is given in Aramaic (Ezra iv.8-vi. 18 and vii. 12-26). It is an amazing demonstration of the preservative power of a tradition consciously maintained that now, after an absence of two and a half thousand years, Hebrew is again the vernacular on the streets of Jerusalem.

^这种发展趋势其实早已为人所知，因为印度的原始文字——佉卢文和婆罗米文——都源自阿拉姆文。而婆罗米文又是南亚和东南亚其他所有字母的起源，因此，波斯国王大流士选择阿拉姆语作为其帝国的标准语言，实际上奠定了未来2500年亚洲大部分地区的文字系统。

^* This momentum was known anyway, since India’s original scripts, Kharoshthi and Brahmi, are both derived from Aramaic writing. Since Brahmi in turn is the origin of every other alphabet in South and South-East Asia, the Persian king Darius was in effect setting the writing systems of most of Asia for the next 2500 years when he chose Aramaic as the standard language for his empire.

^†法国历史学家费尔南·布罗代尔很难原谅他错失了向西进军、从而占领地中海的机会（布罗代尔 2001：277-84，“亚历山大的错误”）。

^† The French historian Fernand Braudel can hardly forgive him for missing his opportunity to go west instead, and so take over the Mediterranean (Braudel 2001: 277-84, ‘Alexander’s mistake’).

^*马太福音 xxvii.74。Sawyer (1999: 84) 引用了大量证据来证明人们对加利利的态度。

^* Matthew xxvii.74. Sawyer (1999: 84) quotes a lot of evidence for attitudes to Galilean.

^† Urfa这个名字可能源自Hurri（参见其周边省份的希腊语名称Orrhoēnē），其历史可以追溯到米坦尼时期。

^† The name Urfa is probably derived from Hurri (cf. the Greek name of its surrounding province, Orrhoēnē), with a history going back to the Mitannian period.

^†穆斯林本身从未对阿拉姆语使用者构成实际威胁，因为他们在各地都将穆斯林视为“米利特”（millet），即不同的民族，彼此独立但受到尊重。然而，各地的阿拉姆语使用者都有一种趋势，即放弃日常使用阿拉姆语，转而使用阿拉伯语。

^† The Muslims in themselves were never a physical threat to the Aramaic speakers, since they saw them everywhere as millet, or distinct nationalities, separate but respected. But there was a tendency for Aramaic speakers everywhere to give up everyday use of the language in favour of Arabic.

基督徒并非唯一继续使用阿拉姆语的群体，尽管他们的使用时间最长。美索不达米亚南部的诺斯替教派也使用另一种阿拉姆语方言，称为曼达特语或曼达语，至少一直使用到公元八世纪。此外，巴比伦和波斯的犹太人也继续使用阿拉姆语数个世纪，其中最著名的当属篇幅浩瀚的《巴比伦塔木德》。这两个群体都创作了大量的文学作品^。

^* Christians were not the only people to go on speaking Aramaic, though they have lasted longest. The Gnostic sect of southern Mesopotamia also spoke another dialect of Aramaic, known as Mandate or Mandaean, at least until the eighth century. And for a few centuries AD, the Jews of Babylonia and Persia also continued, producing most notably the vast Babylonian Talmud. Both these communities were prolific in writing literature.

^†如今，以色列、黎巴嫩、叙利亚、伊拉克、伊朗和土耳其等国的主要城市也聚集着相当数量的亚美尼亚人。据说，1827年俄波战争后，许多人移居亚美尼亚和格鲁吉亚；还有相当一部分人聚集在美国。麦克卢尔（2001）探讨了互联网如何将他们联系在一起。她引用了全球约100万至300万亚美尼亚人的估计数字。

^† There is a considerable modern diaspora too, to the major cities of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey. Many are said to have emigrated to Armenia and Georgia after the Russo-Persian war of 1827; and a sizeable number have gathered in the USA. The use of the Internet in binding them together is examined in McClure (2001). She quotes estimates of worldwide numbers around 1-3 million.

^§它的名称源自阿拉伯语qibt，意为“埃及的”，是希腊语Aigyptios 的缩写。

^§ Its name is derived from Arabic qibt, ‘Egyptian’, a shortening of the Greek Aigyptios.

^这造成了一些语言学上的问题，因为穆罕默德的阿拉伯语方言略有非标准：它缺少喉塞音'（即哈姆扎，相当于伦敦英语中“bitter”一词的tt音），主格词尾的-n音缺失，阴性名词的-t音变成了-h音。学者们希望保留原文，但按照标准阿拉伯语的规则朗诵。因此，所有这些阿拉伯语辅音都必须用特殊的重音符号添加到书面文本中，如同元音一样。这些符号现在都已成为阿拉伯语拼写的标准符号。

^* This caused some philological problems, since Muhammad’s dialect of Arabic was slightly nonstandard: it lacked the glottal stop ’, known as hamza (the stop heard in place of the tt of the London pronunciation of ‘bitter’), had lost the -n ending of the nominative, and had turned the -t ending of feminine nouns into -h. The scholars wanted to retain the text exactly as written, but recite it according to the rules of standard Arabic. As a result, all these consonants of Arabic had to be inserted in the written text with special accent marks, as if they were vowels. These marks are all now standard in Arabic spelling.

^阿拉伯文字比其语言本身更具普世吸引力，凡是伊斯兰教被接受的地方都采用了阿拉伯文字。尽管阿拉伯文字存在一些功能上的缺陷，例如没有元音和声调的标记，甚至需要复杂的重音符号才能区分所有辅音，但这种情况依然发生了。人们找到了折衷方案，并将其应用于各种语言，包括波斯语、土耳其语、克什米尔语、柏柏尔语、维吾尔语、索马里语、豪萨语、斯瓦希里语和马来语，以及西班牙语和塞尔维亚-克罗地亚语等。阿拉伯文字的成功必然归功于这样一个事实：在穆斯林国家，识字教育的核心是阿拉伯文字书写的《古兰经》圣典；因此，任何其他文字系统都只会增加复杂性。

^* Arabic script turned out to be much more universally attractive than its language, and has been taken up wherever Islam was accepted. This has happened despite its functional weaknesses, with no marking of vowels or tones, and a need for elaborate accents even to distinguish all the consonants. Nevertheless, compromises have been found, and it has been applied to languages as various and as unrelated as Persian, Turkish, Kashmiri, Berber, Uighur, Somali, Hausa, Swahili and Malay, as well as Spanish and Serbo-Croat. It must owe this success to the fact that literacy in Muslim countries finds its alpha and its omega in the sacred text of the Qur’ān in Arabic script; so any other writing system can only be an extra complication.

^值得注意的是，这个词中的 j 发音与judge 中的 j 发音相同。

^* It may be worth noting that the j in this word is pronounced as in judge.

^†但人们不禁要问，为何日耳曼人，尤其是西哥特人，在公元410年同样征服了邻近的更高级文明——罗马帝国，却几乎立刻将自己塑造成罗马帝国的保护者，而他们的语言策略却如此迥异？但在欧洲，并没有像波斯语那样的第三种语言：拉丁语仍然是世俗权力的唯一语言，也是罗马教会的语言。

^† But one is left wondering why the linguistic approach of the Germans, notably the Visigoths, had been so different, when in 410 they likewise took over control of the neighbouring higher civilisation, the Roman empire, only to cast themselves, almost immediately, as its protectors. But in the European case, there was no third language playing the role of Persian: Latin was still the only language of temporal power, as well as the language of the Roman Church.

^豪萨语，以尼日利亚北部卡诺为中心，对语言限制构成了更大的挑战。它有一些与阿拉伯语相似的特征，例如有阳性和阴性两种性别，阴性用 -a 标记（参见阿拉伯语的-ah）；以及缺少p——与阿拉伯语不同，豪萨语通常在借词中用f 代替p 。此外，其主要使用者是穆斯林，他们从阿拉伯语中吸收了大量借词，包括十以上的数字、星期几，甚至一些常用的前缀，例如ma-。（“学校”一词源于阿拉伯语makaranta，由karanta（意为“阅读”）构成，而 karanta 本身又与古兰经（Qur 'ān）一词相关。在阿拉伯语中，“学校”一词为maktab或madrasa，前缀相同，但词干为 ktb（意为“书写”）或 drs（意为“课程”）。）但它也具有许多更典型的非洲邻国语言的特征，例如三个对比鲜明的声调和爆破辅音。或许正是由于它作为通用语的实用性，在西非广泛使用，而不仅仅是在穆斯林群体中，才使其保持了自身的独立性。

^* Hausa, centred on Kano in northern Nigeria, is more of a problem for the constraint. It has certain features that are reminiscent of Arabic, e.g. two genders, masculine and feminine, the latter marked with -a (cf. Arabic -ah); and the absence of p—as in Arabic, it usually replaces p in loan-words with f. Moreover, its predominantly Muslim speakers have filled it with loan words from Arabic, including most of the numerals above ten, and the days of the week, and even some productive prefixes, such as ma-. (’School’ is makaranta, formed from karanta, ‘read’, itself related to the word Qur ‘ān. In Arabic, ‘school’ is maktab, or madrasa, with the same prefix, but ktb, ‘write’, or drs, ‘lesson’, as the stem.) But it also has many features much more typical of its African neighbours, e.g. three contrasting tones, and explosive consonants. It may be that its own utility as a lingua franca, widely used in West Africa and not just among Muslims, has acted to maintain its independence.

^*他们甚至，尤其是在早期几个世纪，远航至东南亚和中国。西拉夫的阿布·扎伊德写道，由于伊拉克与印度和中国市场之间商人往来频繁，851年的海上交通十分繁忙：事实上，他说，878年，一个由12万西方人（包括穆斯林、犹太人、基督徒和琐罗亚斯德教徒）组成的贸易殖民地在广州遭到屠杀（Hourani 1995: 76-7）。

^* They even plied, especially in the early centuries, to South-East Asia and China. Abū Zayd of Sīrāf wrote that sea traffic in 851 was regular because of a great exchange of merchants between Iraq and markets in India and China: in fact, he said, a trade colony of 120,000 Westerners (including Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians) were massacred in Canton in 878 (Hourani 1995: 76-7).

^*桑给巴尔实际上是波斯语的阿拉伯语形式： Zangi-bar，意为“黑人的土地”。

^* Zanzibar is in fact an Arabised form of Persian: Zangi-bar, ‘blacks’ land’.

^*在土耳其语拼写中（由阿塔图尔克于 1928-9 年引入）， c是 [dž]（j 中的 j）， ç是 [č]（ church中的 ch ）， i是舌根后缩的 i（如苏格兰语 kirk中的 i ）， ğ要么是漱口音（如希腊语 gamma 或阿拉伯语 ghain），要么只是前面元音的延长； ö和ü与德语相同。

^* In Turkish spelling (introduced by Atatürk in 1928-9), c is [dž] (j in judge), ç is [č] (ch in church), i is i pronounced with the tongue root drawn back (as in Scots kirk), and ğ is either a gargling sound (like Greek gamma or Arabic ghain) or just a lengthening of the preceding vowel; ö and ü are as in German.

四大

生育胜利：埃及和中国

4

Triumphs of Fertility: Egyptian and Chinese

为了便于阅读和贴近实际，埃及词汇的发音依据 Loprieno 1995 年对早期中古埃及语的重构，并补充说明：他认为难以辨认的元音用 ° 表示。R^是法语（或以色列语）的小舌音 r， j的发音与德语相同，类似于英语单词yet中的 y。h的发音较深，类似于对着眼镜吹气时的 h 音；而ch 的发音类似于英语单词“loch”或“Bach”中的 ch。ayn 是 ayn，源自闪米特语系，类似于英语单词“ahem”开头的清嗓音。但需要注意的是，用象形文字书写的埃及词汇完全没有元音。

^* In the interests of readability and realism, Egyptian words are given according to the reconstruction of Loprieno 1995 for early Middle Egyptian, with the addition that vowels that he believes indiscernible are represented here by °. R is the French (or Israeli) uvular r, and j is pronounced as in German, like English y in yet. is a deeper h, as when huffing on a pair of glasses; and is like ch in ‘loch’ or ‘Bach’.’ is ayn, notorious from Semitic languages, the throat-clearing sound at the beginning of English ‘ahem’. It should be remembered, however, that as written in hieroglyphs, Egyptian words are totally without vowels.

子路说：“如果魏王等着您来掌管他的政务，那么君主的首要任务是什么呢？”

Zi-lu said, ‘If the Prince of Wei were awaiting you, Sir, to take control of his administration, what would be the Master’s priority?’

“现在最需要做的就是纠正名字！”师父回答道。

’The one thing needed is the correction of names!’ the Master replied.

“先生，您真是错得这么离谱吗？”子禄问道，“何必纠正我呢？”

’Are you as wide of the mark as that, Sir?’ said Zi-lu. ‘Why this correcting?’

“余，你真是无知！”师父说道，“智者对于自己不了解的事物，会保持谦逊的态度。如果名称不准确，那么陈述就与事实不符。如果陈述与事实不符，那么事务就无法妥善处理。如果事务无法妥善处理，那么秩序和和谐就无法繁荣。如果秩序和和谐无法繁荣，那么正义就会变得专断。如果正义变得专断，那么人们就会不知所措。因此，智者所说的，总能加以阐释；而他所阐释的，总能付诸实践；因为智者在阐释中绝不会有任何疏漏。”

’How uncultivated you are, Yu!’ responded the Master. ‘A wise man, in regard to what he does not understand, maintains an attitude of reserve. If names are not correct then statements do not accord with facts. And when statements and facts do not accord, then business cannot be properly executed. When business is not properly executed, order and harmony do not flourish. When order and harmony do not flourish, then justice becomes arbitrary. And when justice becomes arbitrary, people do not know how to move hand or foot. Hence whatever a wise man states he can always define, and what he so defines he can always carry into practice; for the wise man will on no account have anything remiss in his definitions.’

孔子，《论语^》十三：3（公元前五世纪初）²

Confucius, Lúnyŭ^† (Analects), xiii:3 (Chinese, early fifth century BC)²

两种古老的语言，地域和时代相距甚远，发展历程却有着惊人的相似之处。它们的语言特质也绝无仅有，唯有彼此可以媲美。

Two ancient languages, widely distant in their lands and their eras, are yet strangely similar in their careers. In their attributes they are unmatched, except by each other.

埃及语和汉语都是承载着极高声望的单一文化传统的载体。对它们而言，在其本土，作为通用语言的地位毋庸置疑。在有文字记载的历史之初，它们就已经在各自语言使用区域的中心地带占据了主导地位。它们各自保持着这种孤立且基本不变的统治地位长达三千多年，跨越了120多代人。然而，尽管这些文化在邻国（这些邻国往往在政治上受其控制）中享有盛名，但它们的语言从未在其本土以外的地区成为通用语。

Egyptian and Chinese are both vehicles of single cultural traditions of immense prestige. For each, the role as universal language was uncontested in their homeland. By the dawn of their recorded histories they were already established over the central zone of the lands where they were to be spoken. Each maintained this position of solitary and basically unchanging dominance for an awesome period of over three thousand years, or more than 120 generations. Yet, in each case, despite the fame and prestige of the culture among neighbours, who were often dominated politically by these powers, the languages never assumed any role as lingua franca beyond the territory that they considered their homeland.

另一个相似之处体现在它们的文字上。每种语言都起源于其独特的书写系统，基于特定风格的象形文字；而且每种文字都很快定型，不再改变。后来，它们都被其他民族吸收，并简化为拼音文字系统的基础：埃及象形文字是腓尼基字母的起点，日本假名音节文字则源自汉字。但在每一种情况下，原语言文化都忽略了这些创新，尽管这意味着需要耗费大量资源来维持漫长的文士培训，但仍基本保持了其古老的系统不变。

Another parallel concerns their scripts. Each language originated its own unique system of writing, based on pictograms in a particular style; and each of these scripts early attained a form that would not change. Each was later taken up by another people, and simplified to yield the basis for a phonetic writing system: Egyptian hieroglyphs were the starting point for the Phoenicians’ alphabet, and the Japanese drew their kana syllabary from Chinese characters. But in each case the original language culture disregarded the innovation, and maintained its ancient system essentially unchanged, despite the vast overhead this entailed in continuing lengthy scribal education.

他们的职业生涯轨迹相似。对我们而言，他们的主要研究意义在于探讨一种语言如何达到稳定状态，一种类似体内平衡的状态，在这种状态下，语言似乎能够吸收任何可能对其产生影响的扰动。这种稳定性在埃及和中国的案例中尤为引人注目，因为这两种语言并非孤立地生存下来，而是在其历史的大部分时间里都经历了人类的入侵，并且占据着足够广阔的地域，足以对单一制政府构成挑战。

Their careers are parallel. For us, their main interest lies in considering how a language can achieve steady state, a kind of homoeostasis where it appears to absorb any perturbation that might affect it. This steadiness is particularly interesting in the cases of Egypt and China, since the languages have not simply survived in isolation, but can be seen coping with human incursions for much of their history, and occupy spaces large enough to pose difficulties for a unitary government.

这种令人费解的统一性，尤其在汉语中，还体现在其语言本身的奇特一致性上。诚然，汉语有方言，而且方言之间的差异之大，足以被视为不同的语言。但这个广为人知的事实远不如一个鲜为人知的事实有趣：超过70%的汉语使用者说的是同一种方言，即普通话（或称汉语普通话），^*而作为中国政府的官方语言，普通话的使用范围覆盖了全国超过75%的地区。普通话虽然存在一些地方口音，但内部几乎没有差异。鉴于中国人口众多、地域辽阔，这种语言统一程度之高，在其他任何已知语言中都是绝无仅有的。我们需要探究这种统一性是如何形成的。

Another aspect of this puzzling unity, especially in the case of Chinese, is the strange coherence of the language itself. Certainly Chinese has dialects, and they are different enough often to be considered distinct languages. But this famous fact is less interesting than a less noted one: over 70 per cent of Chinese speakers speak a single variety, known as Mandarin or Pŭtōnghuà,^* and this, the official language of the Chinese state, is spoken in more than 75 per cent of the country’s area. It has some local accents but essentially no internal variation. Since both the Chinese population and surface area are vast, the degree of uniformity so achieved is unparalleled in any other known language. We need to consider how it could have come about.

这两者对现代世界也有一些直接的影响。

The two also have some direct implications for the modern world.

埃及最终还是屈服于邻国的入侵，亚述人、波斯人、希腊人、罗马人和阿拉伯人一波又一波地持续入侵，埃及的宗教信仰也逐渐衰落。如今，埃及的宗教信仰即便存在，也只是以科普特教的形式，融入了基督教——一种外来宗教——的礼仪之中。这正体现了在埃及这片土地上，一个看似永恒的传统是如何被摧毁的。不朽究竟是如何被终结的？

Egyptian, after all, did ultimately succumb to the incursions of its neighbours, carried out with steadily increasing permanence by waves of Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs, and now survives, if at all, as Coptic, in the liturgy of what was a foreign religion, Christianity. There is evidence here of what it takes to obliterate a seemingly eternal tradition in the land of its birth. How is immortality undone?

相比之下，汉语尽管在过去两个世纪里饱受政治挫折和冷酷无情的外国人的暴行，却从未像今天这样强大。汉语使用者占世界人口的六分之一，其母语使用者人数是英语使用者的三倍。然而，超过99%的汉语使用者生活在中国，因此它不能被视为世界语言——除非你把中国视为世界。说汉语的人常常称其为“中心国语”，至少从这个意义上讲，汉语的民族中心主义依然存在。我们仍有时间去思考那些使中华帝国如此牢固、紧密地围绕其传统家园运转的力量：它们在现代世界是否依然有效？

By contrast, Chinese, for all the political reverses and atrocities its people have suffered at the hands of heartless foreigners in the last two centuries, has never been stronger than it is today. Its speakers make up one sixth of the world’s population, and it has three native speakers for every one of English. Nevertheless, over 99 per cent of them live in China, so it cannot be considered a world language—unless China is your world. Those who speak it often call it zhōng guô huà, ‘centre realm speech’: in that at least Chinese ethnocentrism is undiminished. There is still time to consider those forces that have kept the Chinese realm so firmly, and compactly, centred on its traditional homeland: will they still prevail in the modern world?

并行职业

Careers in parallel

埃及语和汉语发展历程的显著相似性首先可以从两张时间轴图表中看出。外来入侵和文化影响以粗体字标出。

The remarkable similarity of the careers of the Egyptian and Chinese languages can first be displayed in the form of two chronological charts. Foreign incursions and cultural influences are marked in boldface type.

埃及和中国的历史都由漫长的稳定单一制政府时期构成，其间穿插着内乱或至少是分裂的时期，当时各国各地存在着相互竞争的王朝。埃及有三个稳定的自治时期：古风时期和旧王国时期、中王国时期和新王国时期，之后是晚期，外族统治成为常态而非例外。中国也有三个漫长的本土统治时期：商周封建时代、秦汉第一帝国时期和隋唐宋第二帝国时期，之后又经历了多次部分或全部的外族入侵。

Both Egyptian and Chinese history are made up of long periods of stable unitary government, interspersed with intervals of civil unrest, or at least disunity, when there were competing dynasties in different parts of the countries. Egypt has three such periods of stable self-government, the Archaic + Old, the Middle and the New Kingdoms, followed by a Late Period, when foreign rule was the norm rather than the exception. China also has three long periods of indigenous rule, the feudal age of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, the First Empire of the Qin and Han dynasties, and the Second Empire of the Sui, Tang and Song, which then were overlaid by a succession of partial or total alien invasions.

这两个文明最初都形成于同一条河流的流域，分别是尼罗河^*和黄河（黄河），尽管中国后来扩张，将南方的下一个大河流域——长江流域——也纳入其中。^†这两个文明都表明，尽管它们无法永远守住自己的边界，但从长远来看，成功的入侵者最终会被同化。语言学上的类似例子是，没有哪个外来入侵者能够将自己的语言强加于当地居民，事实上，（直到波斯人和希腊人征服埃及之前）也没有哪个外来者在征服该国后能够将自己的语言保留超过一代人的时间。

Both civilisations were formed originally along the valley of a single river, the Nile^* and the Huang-he (’Yellow River’) respectively, although China expanded to take in the next great river valley to the south, the Yangtze Kiang.^† And both civilisations demonstrated that, although they were not capable of defending their borders indefinitely, successful invaders stood to be absorbed in the long term. The linguistic analogue of this was that no foreign invaders imposed their language on the population, nor indeed (until the Persians and then the Greeks took Egypt) managed to retain their own language for more than a generation after mastering the country.

这两种语言的故事都展现了稳健增长和顽强维护，而非大规模传播。本章首先概述了每种语言的历史，尤其着重介绍了它们与外来语言的交锋：这些外来语言往往在此扎根，但通常不会取代原有语言。掌握了这些事实之后，我们就可以探讨这种语言稳定性背后的秘诀了。

These are both tales of solid growth and heroic maintenance, rather than massive spread. This chapter first sketches each language’s history, particularly noting the encounters with languages spoken by foreign intruders: these often came to stay, but tended not to supplant their hosts. Armed with the facts, we can then consider what might be the secrets of such language stability.

尼罗河沿岸的语言

Language along the Nile

精于言辞，你便可强大；舌头是人的利剑，言语胜过任何战斗……

Be a craftsman in speech, thou mayest be strong, the tongue is a sword to a man, and speech is more valorous than any fighting …

国王医典第32行（埃及，公元前20世纪中期）³

Instruction for King Medicare, line 32 (Egyptian, mid-twentieth century BC)³

埃及语的起源必须追溯到近在咫尺的亚非语系或含闪语系，该语系的后裔语言覆盖了北非大部分地区以及新月沃土（从巴勒斯坦到伊拉克）和阿拉伯半岛的邻近地区。埃及语在这个庞大的语系中没有近亲，但它的语系起源确实解释了它的一些特征，例如阴性名词以-t结尾这一看似平常的现象^。

The origin of the Egyptian language must be found close at hand, in the Afro-Asiatic or Hamito-Semitic family whose descendant languages cover most of North Africa and the neighbouring areas of the Fertile Crescent (from Palestine round to Iraq) and Arabia. Egyptian has no close relatives in this large family, but its family origins do account for some of its characteristic features, mundane things such as the fact that feminine nouns end in -t.^§

庄严的进步

A stately progress

考古学表明，埃及国家最早建立于公元前四千纪末期，位于尼罗河大突出部周边地区，该地区后来被瓦斯特城（希腊人称之为底比斯）所统治，因此位于埃及南部或“上埃及”。显然，埃及语当时已是通用语言，因为在阿拜多斯皇家墓地中，从公元前三千纪初开始，人们在标签和陶器上发现了清晰可辨的象形文字。事实上，从阿斯旺到尼罗河三角洲，包括法尤姆在内，沿尼罗河全长范围内都发现了前王朝时期的遗址，即所谓的纳加达文化遗址，这表明古埃及的整个区域当时都已有人居住。由于周围的沙漠不适宜居住，埃及王国始终沿着尼罗河呈带状发展。传统上，埃及的历史始于国王美尼斯统一上下埃及，并将首都设在下埃及的明纳法尔（孟菲斯）。

Archaeology shows that the Egyptian state was established first in the late fourth millennium BC, in the region surrounding the great salient of the Nile which was later dominated by the city of Wast (known to the Greeks as Thebes), hence in southern or ‘Upper’ Egypt. It is apparent that Egyptian was already the language spoken, since there are legible hieroglyphic captions on labels and pots in the royal cemetery in this area, at Abydos, from the early third millennium. In fact pre-dynastic sites, of this so-called Nagada culture, have been discovered along the whole length of the Nile from Aswan to the delta and including the Faiyum, showing that the whole area of ancient Egypt was already occupied. Since the surrounding desert remained uninhabitable, the kingdom of Egypt was always a ribbon development along the Nile. Traditionally, its history begins when King Menes unified the Upper and Lower lands, and set up his capital at Min Nafər (Memphis) in Lower Egypt.

这项成就更多地停留在传说层面，而非历史层面，因为没有任何象形文字证据能够与国王的名字对应，也没有任何文字记载表明南北两国曾分别存在不同的国王。尽管如此，两国却有着佩戴形状和颜色各异的王冠的传统，而法老王冠则在形式上统一起来（这与英国国旗的复合特征有异曲同工之妙）。埃及人一直以来都称自己的国家为“TaRwəj”，意为^“两块土地”。

This achievement remained a matter of legend rather than history, since the king’s name cannot be identified with any of the hieroglyphic evidence, and there is no written evidence of separate kings in the north and south. Nevertheless, there was a tradition of differently shaped and coloured crowns for the two kingdoms, unified formally in the historical crown of the pharaoh^† (in a way reminiscent of the composite character of the Union Jack). And the name by which the Egyptians always knew their own country was TaRwəj, ‘the pair of lands’.

此后，埃及语的历史便不复存在，因为它已经占据了其历史上的疆域——从第一瀑布到入海口的尼罗河谷。尽管埃及的势力会周期性地扩张和收缩，沿着尼罗河向上游延伸至库什地区，并向东北方向扩展至巴勒斯坦和叙利亚，但埃及语并未随之传播。近四千年来，它的使用范围始终保持不变。

Thereafter, Egyptian has no history, in that it had achieved its historic domain, the Nile valley from the first cataract to the sea. Although Egyptian power would expand periodically and withdraw again, up the Nile into Kush and north-eastward over Palestine and Syria, the language did not spread with it. For almost four thousand years its range stayed the same.

然而，埃及口语在这段时期内确实发生了语音和句法上的变化。埃及文学的古典语言在公元前三千年得到完善和确立，被称为“中古埃及语”。这种语言在书面语中的使用一直延续到埃及文明的终结，尤其是在正式和礼仪文本中。但显然，口语本身也在逐渐发生变化。语言学家将埃及语划分为众多不同的时期，大致可分为早期（公元前3000-1300年）和晚期（公元前1300-公元1500年）。从公元前二千年中期开始，口语的发展就非常显著了。

Nevertheless, spoken Egyptian did change phonetically and syntactically over this time. The classical language of Egyptian literature was refined and established in the third millennium. Known as ‘Middle Egyptian’, its use was maintained in writing as far as possible until the end of Egypt’s civilisation, above all in formal and ritual texts. But evidently the language gradually changed on the lips of its speakers. Among a host of finer periods, linguists distinguish broadly an earlier era (3000-1300 BC) from a later one (1300 BC-AD 1500). From the middle of the second millennium, it is clear that the spoken language had moved on significantly.

最简单的层面上，语言的语音发生了变化：词尾的r和阴性词尾t消失了，而ch（如church中的ch ）和j（如judge中的j ）被简化，分别被简单的t和d所取代。但结构上也发生了变化。这些变化让人联想到意大利语与拉丁语的差异，或者中古英语与盎格鲁-撒克逊语的差异。在早期，埃及语的词形变化非常丰富，有一套表示数和性的词尾；它没有定冠词或不定冠词（相当于英语中的the或a）；其典型的语序是动词在前，主语在后，宾语在后。在后期，名词词尾的变化趋于消失，但冠词开始出现，以不同的方式表达区别。动词系统变得更加依赖助动词，因此词形变化也变得不那么丰富。此外，主语现在倾向于位于句首（就像现代英语一样）。

On the simplest level, the sounds of the language change: r and the feminine ending t are lost at the end of words, and (ch in church) and d (j in judge) are simplified away, replaced by simple t and d. But there are structural changes too. They are reminiscent of the way in which Italian came to differ from Latin, or Middle English from Anglo-Saxon. In the older period, Egyptian had been highly inflected, with a set of endings for number and gender; it had had no definite or indefinite article (corresponding to English the or a); and the characteristic word order had the verb first in the sentence, followed by subject and then object. In the later period the noun endings tend to be lost, but articles come into play, expressing the distinctions in a different way. The verb system becomes more dependent on auxiliaries, and so less highly inflected. Furthermore, the subject now tends to come first in the sentence (as it does in modern English).

举个例子，埃及语中“愿你的名受尊崇”的意思。它从

Take a single example, the Egyptian for ‘Hallowed be thy name’. This changed from

uw'obu rin-k. to mare pe-k-ran ouop.

shall-be-purified name-your let-do the-your-name be-pure

uw’obu rin-k. tomare pe-k-ran ouop.

shall-be-purified name-your let-do the-your-name be-pure

古典埃及的元素基本仍然存在，但现在组合方式却截然不同。

The pieces of classical Egyptian are still basically there, but now put together quite differently.

令人欣喜的是，这种后来的语言最早出现在记录中，是在宗教改革家法老阿肯那顿统治时期更为流行的书写风格；这场书写改革伴随着官方肖像的出现，这些肖像首次强调了法老的家庭生活，包括他的王后纳芙蒂蒂和他们的女儿们，时间大约在公元前 1330 年。

Charmingly, the first glimpse of this later language to appear in the record is the more popular style of writing seen under the religious reformer Pharaoh Akhenaten; this writing reform came along with official portraits that for the first time emphasised a pharaoh’s home life, with his queen Nefertiti and their daughters, around 1330 BC.

尽管在他统治之后，国教和官方圣像的礼仪得以恢复，但古老的书写风格却再也没有完全回归。宗教文本（仪式、神话和赞美诗）仍然以古典语言形式书写；事实上，这种写法一直延续到公元四世纪象形文字消亡；但通俗文学、学校教材和行政文件表明，当时普遍使用的语言变体已有所不同。

Although the state religion and the decorum of official iconography were restored after his reign, the antiquated style of written expression never fully came back. Religious texts (rituals, mythology and hymns) did continue to be written in the classical form of the language; indeed it persisted until the end of hieroglyphic writing in the fourth century AD; but popular literature, school texts and administrative documents show that a different variant of the language was now being used generally.

从阿肯那顿时代起，这种语言在埃及又作为日常生活的主要媒介延续了两千年之久。

The language persisted in Egypt as the main medium of daily life for another two thousand years from the time of Akhenaten.

在这种潜在的延续性基础上，主要的戏剧性冲突来自于与其他语言使用者的接触，这些语言的使用者后来定居在埃及。这四种语言分别是：利比亚语、库什语、阿拉姆语和希腊语。

Against this underlying continuity, the main dramatic interest was provided by contact with other languages whose speakers came to live in Egypt. There were four such languages: Libyan, Kushite, Aramaic and Greek.

来自利比亚和库什的移民

Immigrants from Libya and Kush

利比亚人最早于公元前13世纪，即阿肯那顿倒台后一代人的时间，开始对埃及施加压力。我们读到法老塞提一世和拉美西斯二世发动的沙漠战役，但似乎利比亚移民潮一直持续不断。利比亚军队，特别是卡哈克人、沙尔达纳人和马什瓦什人，被埃及军队接纳为辅助部队。拉美西斯^二世的继任者麦伦普塔（1211-1202年在位）记载了一场击败利比亚各民族（利布人、马什瓦什人和杰赫努人）入侵军队的重大胜利。一代人之后，拉美西斯三世也讲述了约公元前1179年和1176年类似的防御行动。尽管如此，利比亚人对埃及的持续渗透似乎仍在继续，他们在尼罗河三角洲地区逐渐扎根。拉美西斯三世本人就有一位名叫伊内内的利比亚奴隶在宫廷中服侍他。⁵二百七十年后，利比亚派系已发展到足以与王室联姻的稳定地位。第二十二王朝的统治中心并非孟菲斯，而是三角洲的塔尼斯，由利比亚新贵舍顺克（Shoshenq）——一位马什瓦什人——建立。该王朝延续了230年，但因家族内讧而四分五裂，最终被迫接受与另一个三角洲城镇塔雷穆（莱昂托波利斯）建立的独立王朝组成联合王国（利比亚人同样占据主导地位）。

The Libyans first put pressure on Egypt in the thirteenth century BC, a generation after the fall of Akhenaten. We read of desert campaigns by the pharaohs Seti I and Ramses II, but there appears to have been a steady trickle of immigration. Companies of Libyan troops, notably the Qahaq, Shardana and Mashwash, were accepted into the Egyptian army as auxiliaries.⁴ Ramses’ successor Merneptah (1211-1202) reports a massive victory against would-be invading armies of Libyan peoples, Libu, Mashwash and Tjehenu. And Ramses III, a generation later, tells of similar defensive actions c. 1179 and 1176. Nevertheless, a steady infiltration into Egypt seems to have continued, and the Libyan presence became a fixture in the Delta area. Ramses III himself had a Libyan slave, Ynene, serving him at court.⁵ Two hundred and seventy years later, the Libyan faction had established itself with sufficient stability to marry into the royal family. The XXII dynasty, ruling not from Memphis but from Tanis in the Delta, was founded by the Libyan parvenu Shoshenq, a Mashwash. It lasted 230 years, although it was riven by family feuding and was forced to accept a joint (equally Libyan-dominated) kingdom with a separate dynasty set up in another Delta town, Taremu (Leontopolis).

迁徙而来的利比亚人说的语言可能与现代柏柏尔语或塔马齐格特语有关，这两种语言至今仍在北非大部分地区使用。但他们的到来对语言的影响微乎其微。二十一世纪的埃及法老伊尼奥特夫养了一条名叫“ abaqero”的狗，这似乎是图阿雷格柏柏尔语中灰狗“ abaikour”的名称。⁶而在埃及数字中，“十”这个词“ mudjaw ”让人联想到柏柏尔语的“ mraw”。⁷这点影响微乎其微。

The incoming Libyans would have spoken a language related to modern Berber or Tamazight, still spoken in much of North Africa. But the linguistic effect of their arrival is imperceptible. An Egyptian pharaoh of the twenty-first century, Inyotef, had had a dog called ‘abaqero, which seems to be the Tuareg Berber name for a greyhound, abaikour.⁶ And among the Egyptian numerals, the word for ‘ten’, mudjaw, is reminiscent of the Berber mraw.⁷ This is not much.

埃及南部是库什地区。与利比亚边境的侵略方向相反，埃及的侵略也向这个方向蔓延。埃及的动机可以从其对库什的称呼——努比亚（Nubia）——的词源学中推断出来。努比亚源自“ nābaw”（科普特语为nūb），意为“黄金”，尽管主要的金矿位于东部沙漠，位置并不便利。但与埃及一样，努比亚也可以被视为库马特（Kūmat ，意为“黑土地”）不可分割的一部分。库马特由肥沃的尼罗河淤泥构成，而这个王国只是沿着尼罗河呈带状分布的。在古王国时期，埃及一直在第一瀑布以南的自然边界活动，开采黄金，并在第二瀑布附近的布亨（Buhen）建立定居点。埃及在19世纪完全控制了努比亚，18世纪又失去了它，16世纪重新夺回控制权，并统治了五百年之久。埃及总督被授予“库什之子”（ ZIR nasuwt kuš ）的头衔，以彰显其在政府中的核心地位。约在1087年，这位总督滥用职权，占领了埃及首都底比斯，随后撤退到第一瀑布以南，宣布努比亚实际上独立。

To the Egyptian south was the land of Kush. In this direction aggression flowed in the opposite direction from that across the Libyan border. The Egyptian motive can be inferred from the transparent etymology of their name for Kush, Nubia—from nābaw (Coptic nūb), ‘gold’—although the chief mines were inconveniently sited in the eastern deserts. But like Egypt, it could also be seen as an integral part of Kūmat, ‘The Black Land’, made up of fertile Nile silt, the kingdom that existed only as a ribbon development along the great river. Egypt had been operating south of the natural boundary at the first cataract throughout the Old Kingdom, mining gold and establishing a settlement at Buhen, by the second cataract. It gained full control of Nubia in the nineteenth century, lost it again in the eighteenth, re-established control in the sixteenth and then held it for five hundred years. The Egyptian viceroy was given the title ZIR nasuwt kuš, ‘King’s Son of Kush’, to emphasise his centrality in the government. Around 1087 the holder of this office abused his position to occupy the Egyptian capital, Thebes, and then withdrew south of the first cataract to declare effective independence for Nubia.

此后260年间，努比亚杳无音讯。大约在公元前728年，库什统治者迁都纳帕塔，并以法老般的奢华装扮示人，声称对底比斯、孟菲斯和翁（赫利奥波利斯）的诸神崇拜拥有至高无上的统治权。他成功巩固了自己的统治，并在接下来的六十年里，库什人对埃及拥有（相对松散的）控制权。黑土地的统一最终反噬了它昔日的统治者。

Nothing more is then heard of Nubia for 260 years, but around 728 the ruler of Kush, now based at Napata but investing himself with full pharaonic splendour, asserted a claim to celebrate the worship of the gods at Thebes, Memphis and Onw (Heliopolis). He was able to enforce his claim, and the next sixty years saw Kushites in (fairly loose) control of Egypt. The unity of the Black Land had come back to haunt its erstwhile masters.

这种统一最终被亚述人的全面入侵所终结，亚述人于公元前664年从埃及的另一端入侵。战后，埃及建立了一个新的王朝，在其传统疆界内恢复了本土统治，^*而努比亚国王则返回故土，并将都城从纳帕塔迁至尼罗河上游400公里处的麦罗埃。他们在那里建立了麦罗埃文明，该文明一直延续到公元250年左右，其文字系统基于象形文字。他们使用的这种文字与埃及语并无关联，至今仍未被完全理解。

This unity was ended, as it happened, by a full-scale Assyrian invasion, coming in from the opposite end of the country in 664 BC. In the aftermath, a new dynasty in Egypt restored indigenous control within its traditional borders,^* while the Nubian kings returned to their own land and moved their capital from Napata to Meroe, 400 kilometres farther up the Nile. There they founded the Meroitic civilisation, which lasted until AD c.250, with an alphabetic script based on hieroglyphs. The language they wrote in this way is not related to Egyptian, and is not fully understood to this day.

尽管埃及与努比亚长期共存，但埃及本土使用的埃及语并未受到任何已知的影响。由于我们没有当时库什地区所用语言的直接证据，因此很难判断这种影响的具体细节。在埃及统治库什时期，埃及语在其北部地区的精英阶层中必定被广泛使用，但随着两国关系的断绝，埃及语的使用也随之消失，尽管在库什南部地区，人们对埃及事物的热情依然明显。两国断断续续的帝国扩张持续了两千多年，但最终双方都失去了任何持久的语言联系。

Once again there was no known impact on Egyptian as used in Egypt itself, despite the long coexistence of Egypt with Nubia. The details of influence are difficult to judge since we have no direct evidence of the language spoken in Kush at the time. During the period of Egyptian control of Kush, Egyptian must have been used widely at elite levels in its northern regions, but use of Egyptian did not survive the withdrawal of links between the two countries, despite the evident enthusiasm for things Egyptian which persisted south of the border. The mutual imperial adventure had lasted, on and off, over two thousand years, but it had left both partners without any lasting linguistic link.

埃及试图征服的另一个国家是其东北部的迦南地。自古以来，迦南地就与巴勒斯坦有着贸易往来，大约在公元前第二个千年中期，与腓尼基城市比布鲁斯的贸易尤为密切，比布鲁斯向埃及供应产自黎巴嫩的雪松木材。公元前1830年左右，一位法老入侵了巴勒斯坦南部，但人们对他的动机和后果知之甚少。四个世纪后，埃及发动了一场持续的战争，试图控制整个巴勒斯坦，北至米坦尼的边界。有人将其解释为埃及试图彻底摆脱外国统治的威胁，此前埃及曾遭受所谓的希克索斯王朝（希腊语为hqR hrst，意为“外来统治者”）的统治。但没有任何语言或其他方面的证据表明，无论这个王朝是谁，他们都来自东北部。

Another country where Egypt attempted conquest was the land of Canaan to its north-east. Since the earliest period there had been trade links with Palestine, and around the middle of the second millennium these became particularly strong with the Phoenician city of Byblos, which supplied cedar timber logged in Lebanon. Around 1830 BC, a pharaoh invaded the south of Palestine, but little is known of his motives or any consequences. Four centuries later, there was a sustained campaign to control the whole country as far north as the borders of Mitanni. This has been explained as an attempt to free Egypt once and for all from the threat of foreign domination, recently suffered under the so-called Hyk-sōs kings (a Greek rendering of hqR hrst, ‘ruler from abroad’). But there is no evidence, linguistic or other, that this dynasty, whoever they were, had come from the north-east.

无论动机如何，埃及确实成功地在巴勒斯坦和叙利亚建立了统治地位，北至乌加里特。阿玛纳外交信函证实了这一点，这些信函的年代介于公元前1345年至1330年之间，主要内容是法老与其众多迦南附庸之间的书信往来，尤其是与比布鲁斯统治者里巴达的通信。这部分信函全部使用阿卡德语。埃及方面的信件使用相当规范的阿卡德语，但回信却使用了一种深受迦南语影响的方言。双方都无法完全驾驭这种通用语。但对我们而言，关键在于，经过^一个世纪的政治统治，埃及并没有有效地传播其语言知识，即使是对那些自称是埃及主人仆人的国王和官员来说也是如此。^相反，他们使用东方主要强权的语言进行交流。

Whatever the motive, Egypt did succeed in establishing Egyptian over-lordship throughout Palestine and Syria as far as Ugarit in the north. This is confirmed by the Amarna diplomatic correspondence, which relates to the years from 1345 to 1330 BC, and is largely taken up with exchanges of letters between the pharaoh and many of his Canaanite vassals, notably Ribhadda, the ruler of Byblos. This part of the correspondence is exclusively in Akkadian. The letters from the Egyptian side are in quite good Akkadian, but the answers that came back are in a dialect heavily influenced by Canaanite languages.⁸ Neither side was fully at ease in this lingua franca. But the point for us is that after a century of political domination Egypt had not transmitted effective knowledge of its language, not even to kings and officials who were professing themselves servants of an Egyptian master.^* Instead they communicated in the language of the principal eastern power.

来自阿拉姆语和希腊语的竞争

Competition from Aramaic and Greek

这种力量最初集中在亚述，后来转移到巴比伦，最终到达波斯，并在接下来的千年里持续增长。随着埃及失去对巴勒斯坦的控制（其最后的辉煌是利比亚法老舍顺克于公元前925年左右入侵巴勒斯坦），公元前8世纪亚述在同一地区的势力范围不断扩大，埃及开始吸引难民和流亡者。他们所说的语言是阿拉姆语，此时阿拉姆语已遍布整个闪米特语系的中东地区，甚至在亚述帝国境内取代了阿卡德语。

That power, first focused in Assyria, later in Babylon, finally in Persia, continued to grow in influence over the next thousand years. As Egypt lost its control of Palestine (its last hurrah was the campaign of the Libyan pharaoh Shoshenq through Palestine around 925), and then the eighth century BC saw Assyria advance its control in the same region, Egypt began to attract refugees and exiles. The language they spoke was Aramaic, which by this time had spread all over the Semitic-speaking Middle East, and had even replaced Akkadian throughout the Assyrian empire.

公元前七世纪，亚拉姆语随着公元前671年至667年亚述入侵埃及而真正传入埃及。亚述军队洗劫了底比斯，扶植了一个傀儡法老。然而，亚述的统治只是昙花一现。公元前639年，傀儡法老尼哥之子普萨姆泰克夺回了埃及的独立。他很快开始重新确立埃及在巴勒斯坦的地位，于公元前630年占领了非利士首都亚实突，并于公元前610年击败并杀死了犹大王约西亚。他的继任者们延续了这一政策长达六十五年，利用亚述被巴比伦衰落的机会，将整个巴勒斯坦和叙利亚变成了埃及和巴比伦之间所有敌对行动的缓冲区。公元前587年耶路撒冷被洗劫，犹太人被流放到巴比伦，这是埃及为这一政策付出的代价之一。

In the seventh century BC, Aramaic entered Egypt in earnest, borne by the Assyrian invasion force of 671-667 which sacked Thebes and installed a puppet pharaoh. But Assyrian domination turned out to be transient, and Psamtek, the son of the quisling pharaoh Neko, was able to reclaim Egypt’s independence by 639. He soon began to reassert Egypt’s role in Palestine, occupying the Philistine capital Ashdod in 630, and defeating and killing Josiah, king of Judah, in 610. His successors continued the policy for another sixty-five years, taking advantage of the eclipse of Assyria by Babylon, and turning Palestine and Syria as a whole into a buffer zone for all the hostilities between Egypt and Babylon. The sack of Jerusalem in 587, and the exile of the Jews to Babylon, was one of the prices that others paid for this policy.

这可能对语言产生的最终影响是，传入埃及的不是阿拉姆语，而是希腊语。普萨美提克与爱奥尼亚和卡里亚海盗结成的投机联盟使他得以摆脱亚述的统治。这奠定了该王朝在军事和商业上与希腊人结盟的基调。一支由希腊人建造的三列桨战舰组成的埃及舰队巡逻于红海和地中海沿岸；在公元590年代，一支希腊雇佣兵部队随埃及军队沿尼罗河而上，执行对努比亚的最后一次任务。希腊贸易殖民地瑙克拉提斯建立在尼罗河三角洲西部的赛斯附近，作为一个条约港口，其地位与公元19世纪和20世纪中国的上海非常相似。贸易十分繁荣，尤其是埃及小麦和亚麻布的贸易，以希腊葡萄酒和白银支付。据五世纪诗人巴克利德斯所说，希腊人在酒酣耳热之时，会幻想满载小麦从埃及驶来的船只^。9

Probably the net effect of this on language was to bring into Egypt not Aramaic, but Greek. An opportunistic alliance with Ionian and Carian pirates had enabled Psamtek to shake off Assyria. This set the tone for the dynasty’s practice of acting in consort with Greeks, both militarily and commercially. An Egyptian fleet of Greek-built triremes patrolled the Red Sea and Mediterranean coasts, and there was a Greek mercenary contingent with the Egyptian forces sent up the Nile on a last mission against Nubia in the 590s. The Greek trading colony of Naucratis was established close to Sais in the west of the Delta, as a treaty port very comparable to Shanghai in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries AD. There was a roaring trade, notably in Egyptian wheat and linen, paid for with Greek wine and silver. Greeks, when high on wine, says Bacchylides, a poet of the fifth century, would fantasise about ships from Egypt laden with wheat.⁹

这标志着三角洲地区丰富多元的国际化氛围的开端，而三百年后，随着亚历山大港作为希腊城市的扩张，这种氛围将得以充分展现。希腊语的声音在埃及将变得耳熟能详，即便当时学习希腊语的人寥寥无几。^*但在希腊语达到鼎盛时期之前，埃及将经历一段阿拉姆语的无意识渗透期。

This was the beginning of a rich, cosmopolitan atmosphere in the Delta that was to be fulfilled in the expansion of Alexandria as a Greek city three hundred years later. The sound of Greek would have become familiar in Egypt, even if few as yet would have been learning it.^* But before Greek reached its acme, Egypt would undergo an involuntary infusion of Aramaic.

阿拉姆语不仅是巴比伦人的语言，也被波斯帝国采纳为官方语言。正是波斯帝国完成了此前不可能完成的任务：将埃及永久地置于外国统治之下。公元前522年，波斯人入侵埃及，废黜并杀害了法老普萨美克三世，建立了一套标准的波斯行政体系，埃及沦为总督管辖下的一个行省。此时，沉醉于希腊美酒的埃及才被拉回现实。

Aramaic, besides being the language of the Babylonians, was also adopted as the official language of the Persian empire, and it was this state which achieved the hitherto impossible task of subjecting Egypt durably to foreign rule. Egypt, drunk on Greek wine, was brought down to earth when the Persians marched in in 522 BC, deposed and killed the pharaoh Psamtek III, and set up a standard Persian administration with Egypt reduced to a province under a satrap.

波斯统治持续了两个世纪，期间在四世纪埃及曾短暂复兴，但最终被镇压。阿拉姆语不仅成为政府和法律的官方语言，也成为广泛使用的私人交流媒介。事实上，气候的偶然性反而扭曲了历史记载。由于气候干燥，埃及保存了这一时期绝大多数的阿拉姆语文献，这些文献涵盖了纸莎草纸、羊皮纸、石刻和金属刻字等各种形式。

Persian rule lasted for two centuries, tempered by a resurgence of Egyptian independence in the fourth century that was later crushed. The Aramaic language established itself not just as a language of government and law, but also as a widespread medium of private communication. In fact, an accident of climate rather distorts the record. Because of its dry climate, Egypt provides the vast bulk of documents in Aramaic that have survived from this period, whether on papyrus, parchment, painted on stone or incised on metal.

因此，阿拉姆语是三千年来第一个对埃及产生重大影响的语言。公元前332年，亚历山大征服埃及，开启了长达三个世纪的希腊统治。他发现当时的行政体系使用阿拉姆语；在某些方面，例如在法庭上，这种语言在托勒密王朝时期仍然保留了下来，^但总体而言，阿拉姆语在官方语言中被希腊语所取代。尽管托勒密王朝认真履行了他们作为法老希腊继承者的角色，希腊统治下的埃及也再次成为一个自治且繁荣的国家，但埃及语从此被置于神圣与世俗的极端：在神庙中，以及在普通民众的口中。亚历山大取代雅典成为古代世界的学术中心，它是一座以希腊语为主要语言的城市。众所周知，最后一位托勒密王朝的统治者克利奥帕特拉女王（公元前51-30年）也是第一个学习埃及语的人——而这显然仅仅是因为她对语言的热爱。

Aramaic, then, was the first language in three millennia to make a significant inroad into Egypt. When Alexander took the country in 332 BC, initiating three centuries of Greek rule, he found an administration run in Aramaic; in some respects, for instance in the law courts, this language persisted under the Ptolemies,¹⁰ but in general Aramaic was replaced in official use by Greek. Although the Ptolemies took their role as Greek successors to the pharaohs seriously, and Greek Egypt became an autonomous and prosperous country again, the Egyptian language was henceforth relegated to the extremes of sacred and profane: in the temples, and on the lips of the common people. Alexandria, which replaced Athens as the academic centre of the ancient world, was a Greek-speaking city. Famously, Queen Cleopatra, the last Ptolemy to rule (51-30 BC), was also the first to learn Egyptian—and that apparently only because she had a passion for languages.

她的声音本身就令人愉悦。她就像一件多弦乐器，能轻松地驾驭各种方言。她很少需要通过翻译与外国人交谈，因为她大多都能用自己的语言回答，无论是埃塞俄比亚语、特罗戈底语、希伯来语、阿拉伯语、叙利亚语、米底语还是帕提亚语。在她之前的君王们甚至连埃及语都懒得学，有些人甚至连马其顿语都不懂^。

There was pleasure in the very sound of her voice. Like a many-stringed instrument, she turned her tongue easily to whatever dialect she would, and few indeed were the foreigners with whom she conversed through an interpreter, since she answered most of them in her own words, whether Ethiopian, Trogodyte, Hebrew, Arab, Syriac, Median or Parthian. The kings before her had not even had the patience to acquire Egyptian, and some had even been lacking in their Macedonian.^*

写作方式的改变

Changes in writing

埃及语的书面形式比口头形式经历了更为彻底的变革。在埃及古迹中常见的那些优雅而精确的象形符号，被希腊人称为“象形文字”，意为“神圣的雕刻”，翻译自埃及语“ maduww nāts ar”，意为“神的话语”（本章开头的文本中也用此词指代普塔神创造万物的言语）。我们无从得知这些符号是如何产生的，而且在它们使用的约3400年间，它们基本上没有发生任何变化。然而，在最后几个世纪，随着埃及宗教在希腊化和基督教化的国家中日益成为一种古物研究实践，这套符号系统所蕴含的象征意义和图像表达空间也日益扩大。大量新的象形文字被创造出来，表明这套系统不再受限于实用文字的范畴。最后一条铭文可追溯至公元394年，之后便被基督教当局所压制。^*

The Egyptian language went through more radical revolutions in its written form than it did orally. The elegant and exact pictorial symbols familiar from Egyptian monuments were called (by the Greeks) hieroglyphs, ‘sacred carvings’, translating the Egyptian term ’, maduww nāts ar, ‘words of god’ (the phrase also used for Ptah’s creative words in the text that heads this chapter). We have no indication as to how they arose, and they undergo essentially no modification in the 3400 or so years for which we see them in use, although in the last few centuries, when Egyptian religion was increasingly an antiquarian practice within a Hellenised and Christianised country, the scope the system gave for symbolism and imagery has increasing play. Vast numbers of new pictograms are invented, showing that the system is no longer bound by the constraint of being a practical script. The last inscription dates to AD 394, after which it was suppressed by the Christian authorities.^*

自最早的非碑文文献（约公元前2600年）出现以来，一种与之平行的文字——僧侣体（或称“祭司体”）——虽然形式相同，但更为流畅。这两种文字实际上构成了一个单一的系统，既可以书写成碑文式的字形，也可以书写成草书式的字形。该系统包含约175个符号，分别代表辅音或辅音组合，另有数百个符号与这些符号结合使用，以明确具体含义。

They had, from the time of the first non-monumental documents (c.2600 BC) been paralleled by an equivalent but more cursive script, called hieratic—’priestly’. These two scripts made up what was essentially a single system, which could be rendered either in monumental glyphs or a cursive scrawl, with about 175 signs interpreted as consonants or sequences of consonants, and a few hundred signs used in conjunction with them to specify meanings.

从公元前七世纪开始，一种被称为世俗体（或“通俗体”）的新书写风格开始被使用：它最初是僧侣体的一种彻底简化的形式，但当与原始象形文字的联系被遗忘时，很快就与传统体系分道扬镳。

From the seventh century BC, a new style of writing, known as demotic—’popular’—began to be used: it began as a radically simplified form of hieratic writing, but soon diverged from the traditional system when the link with the original hieroglyphs was forgotten.

公元前四世纪末希腊征服埃及之后，世俗体文本中开始出现希腊语注释，以澄清一些难以理解之处。希腊语识字率逐渐普及。尽管如此，埃及本土的书写系统仍需很长时间才能发展完善。现存最后一份有确切年代的世俗体文本，其年代距希腊征服埃及已过去452784年，距托勒密王朝被罗马取代已过去482年，距使徒圣马可据称首次在当时的埃及首都亚历山大港传道已过去310年。与58年前最后一份象形文字文本一样，这份文本也是在埃及的最后一个前哨——菲莱岛上发现的^。

After the Greek conquest at the end of the fourth century BC, Greek glosses begin to appear in demotic texts, to clarify a difficult reading here and there. Literacy in Greek was becoming widespread. Despite this, the indigenous system of writing still had a very long way to run. The last dated demotic text is from AD 452,784 years after the Greek conquest, 482 years after the Ptolemies had been supplanted by Rome, and 310 years after the apostle St Mark is said to have first preached in the then Egyptian capital of Alexandria. Like the last hieroglyphs written fifty-eight years before, it was found on the last outpost of Egypt, the island of Philae.¹²

最终悖论

Final paradoxes

正如我们所见，基督教终结了象形文字，也终结了古埃及文化的核心。但即便如此，它却产生了一种意想不到的后果，确保了埃及语本身的长期存续。到了公元三世纪，埃及语早已在政府和精英生活中失去了任何地位，这些领域如今完全由希腊语主导。然而，就在此时，新兴的基督教势力却将埃及语视为促进埃及人民皈依基督教的最佳途径。因此，他们将其作为一种新型文学的载体，用希腊字母来书写埃及语。由于埃及语的语音系统比希腊语更为复杂，他们添加了六个新的字母（借用自世俗体文字）：科普特字母由此诞生。这一新的文学传统始于圣经的翻译，随后扩展到原创作品，讲述埃及沙漠教父、圣帕科米乌斯及其追随者的生平事迹。科普特语成为基督教教义发展的重要渠道，其讲道、信件和论战文章在埃及教会中广为流传。

As we have seen, Christianity was to put an end to hieroglyphic writing and with it the central stream of ancient Egyptian culture. But despite this it had a last perverse effect, ensuring the long-term survival of the Egyptian language itself. By the third century AD Egyptian had long lost any role in government or elite life, which were now conducted exclusively in Greek. Yet at this very point, the newly rising force of Christians saw the language as the best means to advance the conversion of the Egyptian people. As such, they made it the vehicle of a new sort of literature, in which the Greek alphabet would be used to represent Egyptian. Since the Egyptian language is more complex in its sound system than Greek, six new letters (borrowed from the demotic script) were added: and so the Coptic alphabet was created. The new tradition began with translations of the Bible, then expanded into original compositions, narrating the lives of the Fathers of the Egyptian Desert, St Pachomius and his followers. Coptic became a major channel for the development of the Christian doctrine, with homilies, letters and polemics all widely read in the Egyptian Church.

埃及语以这种方式书写了近千年。具有讽刺意味的是，正是后来与基督教教会的这种联系拯救了它；相比之下，伊斯兰教和阿拉伯语在七世纪的迅猛传播很快就淹没了之前的统治者——希腊语。

Egyptian was written in this way for another thousand years. Ironically, it was this late-acquired association with the Christian Church which saved it; by contrast, the lightning spread of Islam and Arabic in the seventh century soon blotted out the language of the previous masters, Greek.

埃及语，即现在的科普特语，在第一次冲击中幸存了下来；但来自阿拉伯语的威胁始终比来自希腊语的威胁更为隐蔽。毕竟，伊斯兰教是一个平等主义的宗教；一旦阿拉伯语被接受，在新政权下，社会晋升便不再受任何限制。几个世纪以来，科普特语的命运与其相关的宗教一同衰落。最后一部用科普特语写成的伟大作品是《三颂》（Triadon），这是一首创作于1300年之后不久的长诗。即使一百年后，据说上埃及的基督徒仍然几乎只说^科普特语，但到了16世纪末，科普特语似乎已经消失，或者几乎消失殆尽。然而，在科普特教会的礼拜仪式中，科普特语的诵读却流传至今。

Egyptian, now known as Coptic, had survived the first onslaught; but the threat from Arabic was always more insidious than that from Greek. Islam, after all, was an egalitarian religion; once Arabic was accepted, there were no other bars to social preferment under the new regime. Over the centuries, the fortunes of the Coptic language ebbed with its associated religion. The last great work written in Coptic is the Triadon, a long poem composed shortly after 1300. Even a hundred years later, Christians in Upper Egypt were said to speak little else,¹³ but it seems that by the end of the sixteenth century Coptic conversation was gone, or almost gone. Its recitation, in the liturgy of the Coptic Church, has lasted to our day.

从黄河到长江的语言

Language from Huang-he to Yangtze

师父说：

The Master said:

不思考而学习是无用的，不学习而思考是危险的。

Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous.

孔子，《论语》，ii.15

Confucius, Lúnyŭ (Analects), ii.15

汉语历史的基本模式与埃及语非常相似，即尽管不断有外来人口涌入，但仍保持了语言的统一性和稳定性。

The basic pattern of the history of the Chinese language is very similar to that of Egyptian, the maintenance of unity and linguistic stability despite repeated alien influxes.

起源

Origins

汉语的近亲分布在西藏和缅甸，但彼此关系并不密切：汉语通常被视为汉藏语系的一个独立分支，与该语系的其他主要语言并无特殊联系，例如藏语、克伦语、缅语，甚至包括中国南方的一些语言，如彝语、傈僳语和景颇语。这些语言的基本结构非常相似，都是声调语言，大多数词汇或词根都是单音节的，名词、形容词和动词都没有词形变化。但这不足以界定汉语所属的语系，而只能界定其所属的地域，因为邻近的其他一些不相关的语言，例如泰语、壮语、苗语和勉语，也具有类似的特征。

The language’s closest relatives are found in Tibet and Burma, but they are not close: Chinese is generally seen as a separate branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, with no special link to any of the other major languages in it: these include Tibetan, Karen, Burmese, and even such languages of southern China as Yi, Lisu and Jingpo. In their basic structure, all these languages are very similar, as tone languages, with most of the words or word roots monosyllabic, and no inflexion of nouns, adjectives or verbs. But this is not enough to define the family: rather it defines the area, since other unrelated languages in the neighbourhood, such as Thai, Zhuang, Hmong and Mien, are also like this.

汉语最早出现在黄河流域。关于最早的记录，目前仍存在争议。2000年，中国学者在山东省薮县（黄河入海口）出土的距今约4800年的酒杯上辨认出文字。无论这一分析是否正确，目前已知的第二古老的文字也有3400年的历史：它们出现在河北省安阳附近的青铜器、龟甲和牛肩胛骨上（牛肩胛骨经加热至开裂——一种占卜方法）。尽管这些符号最初是象形文字，但整个体系清晰地代表了汉语。视觉双关语用来传达含义更抽象的词语（例如，原本是“麦”的符号，现在代表“来”）。或者更具体的含义（例如，“狼”用“狗”表示，它是“狗”和“好”的组合）。 ^*

The Chinese language first turns up in the valley of the Yellow River or Huang-he. The earliest record is now a matter of controversy. In 2000, Chinese scholars recognised written characters in the markings on some 4800-year-old wine cups, found at Juxian in Shandong (’Mountain East’) province, where the river meets the sea. Whether that analysis is correct or not, the next-oldest characters are still a good 3400 years old: they were found written on bronze vessels, and on tortoiseshells and ox shoulder blades (heated until they cracked—a means of telling fortunes), near Anyang in Hebei (’River North’) province. Although the symbols are by origin pictographic, the system as a whole clearly represents the Chinese language. Visual puns are used to convey words with more abstract meanings (e.g. , originally a symbol for lái, ‘wheat’, represents lái, ‘come’), or more specific ones (e.g. láng, ‘wolf, is shown as , a combination of qušn, ‘dog’, and liáng, ‘good’).^*

标准汉语口语的发展史通常被划分为多个时期：古汉语（公元前500年以前，以《诗经》为代表）、中古汉语（公元前500年至公元7世纪，以《齐云》为代表）、古官话（公元7世纪至14世纪）、中古官话（公元14世纪至18世纪）以及现代官话（即现代官话）。诗歌在早期汉语发展史中的重要性并非出于美学考量。鉴于汉字与发音之间的间接联系，口语发展史的证据主要来源于对诗歌的细致分析，尤其是对押韵词的考察。

The subsequent history of standard Chinese as spoken is conventionally divided into many periods, Old Chinese (up to 500 BC, represented by the Shījīng, ‘Book of Poetry’), Middle Chinese (500 BC-seventh century AD, represented by the Qièyùn rhyming dictionary), Old Mandarin (seventh to fourteenth centuries), Middle Mandarin (fourteenth to eighteenth centuries) and Modern Mandarin ever since. The prominence of poetry in the early part of this record is not a matter of aesthetics. Given the indirectness of the connection between Chinese script and its pronunciation, the evidence for the development of the spoken language comes mostly from detailed analysis of verse, particularly looking at which words rhyme.

书面语言本身并不能充分反映过去2500年来的语言发展，因为文言（即古典汉语）形成于春秋时期（公元前770-476年），孔子的《论语》等经典著作也成书于此时，此后文言几乎未曾改变。直到20世纪，文言才不再是主要的书面表达方式，一种基于汉语词汇和结构的新型书面语逐渐普及。然而，文言形成于东北地区，其形成时间仅比汉语全国统一化进程晚了一千年左右。因此，它为研究自其成为通用语以来两千五百年间各种现代方言的变化提供了一个有用的基准。例如，语言史上的一个典型悖论是，汉语中变化最小的方言是距离东北最远的方言：粤语，中国人称之为长期独立的“蛮夷”王国粤语。

The written language itself does not give much away about language development over the last 2500 years, since the classical language, known as wényán (), was defined in the Chūnqiū, ‘Spring and Autumn’, period (770-476 BC), when the great classics such as Confucius’s Analects were written, and was kept unchanged virtually ever after. It was only in the twentieth century that wényán ceased to be the usual means of written expression, and a new written style, based on the words and structures of Mandarin, became universal. But wényán was formed in a region (the north-east) and at a time that is only a millennium or so after the beginning of Chinese progression across the country. As such, it gives a useful baseline for the changes that have affected different modern dialects over the two and a half millennia since it was the vernacular. For example, in one of the paradoxes typical of language history, it shows that the least-changed dialect of Chinese is the one spoken farthest away from the north-east: Cantonese, known to the Chinese by the name of the long-independent ‘barbarian’ kingdom of Yuè.

书面证据与口语现实之间的差距意味着，语言历史发展过程中各种影响因素的具体细节，很大程度上只能是推测。我们只能推断，而无法完整地记录我们将要描述的各种力量。其中一些力量以零散的方式作用于汉语，形成了我们今天听到的各种方言，尤其是在南方；而另一些力量则使绝大多数汉语使用者在口语标准逐渐演变的过程中，依然保持着密切的联系，这种联系贯穿了整个历史时期。

The gap between written evidence and spoken reality means that a fair amount of the detail of how influences have played out in the history of the language must remain conjectural. We can only infer, and we cannot fully document, the forces that we shall be describing, some of them operating piecemeal on Chinese to produce the variety of dialects heard, especially in the south, but others keeping the vast majority of speakers in close touch with each other even as the spoken standard gradually moved, all down the ages.

中国的政治统一程度，尽管其兴衰更替是中国历史的惯常节奏，但对于叙述汉语的传播和演变却意义不大。根据考古证据，中华文化从黄河中游流域向四面八方传播，尤其以向南传播最为显著。在商代（公元前二千纪中后期），我们已经在长江以南发现了文物，这些文物在周代（公元前一千纪早期）向上游传播至中国中部。但我们知道，在公元前三世纪，楚国（大致位于今天的四川，长江以北）仍然在使用一种不同于汉语的语言^。

The degree of political unity in China, although its cyclical rise and fall is the usual tick-tock of Chinese history, is not particularly useful in recounting the spread and transformations of the Chinese language. Following the archaeological evidence, Chinese culture spread out from the middle Yellow River valley in all directions, but most significantly towards the south. In the Shang period (middle to late second millennium) we already find artefacts south of the Yangtze, and these spread out upstream into central China in the Zhou (early first millennium BC). But we know that a language different from Chinese was still spoken in the kingdom of Chu (approximately modern Sichuan, north of the Yangtze) in the third century BC^*

从地理上看，中国人正从寒冷干燥的北方平原（那里种植小麦和小米）迁徙到温暖湿润的高原地区（那里以水稻为主食）。除了气候差异，地形也截然不同，这使得南方的迁徙之路更加艰辛，正如谚语所说“南船北马”。实际上，水路——由自然而非人力开辟而成——是南方唯一便捷的出行方式。这并未阻碍中国文化和语言的传播，但也意味着文化或语言的统一性在南方难以轻易实现。

Geographically, Chinese was moving from the cold, dry northern plains where wheat and millet were cultivated into the warmer, wetter uplands where the staple was rice. As well as a difference in climate, there was a difference in terrain, which made the going much tougher in the south: nán chuán běi mš, ‘south boat, north horse’, as the proverb has it. In practice waterways, defined by nature rather than human resource, are the only way to travel easily in the south. This was not a barrier to Chinese cultural and linguistic spread, but it did mean that uniformity, cultural or linguistic, was never so easily imposed there.

南迁的动机无疑是寻求更肥沃的土地，而其成功必然得益于北方人积累的技术优势，例如拥有文字和大规模的组织。公元前221年，秦始皇（统一中国中部大部分地区的第一位皇帝）下令五十万殖民者前往他新征服的“越族”地区，填补其领土上的空缺，这便是南迁对政治的首次体现。此时，除了经济动机之外，又增添了政治动机：统一中国的暴君渴望将传统家族与其祖传权力基础割裂开来；在接下来的千年里，这种政治推动力不时地被激发出来。^†

The motive behind the movement southward was no doubt the quest for more fertile soil, and its success must have been backed by the advantages in technology that the northerners were accumulating, symbolised by possession of a written language and large-scale organisation. The first reflection of this on politics comes in 221 BC, with the command of Shi Huang Di, the First Emperor, who unified most of central China, to half a million colonists to go and fill his newly conquered territories ‘among the various Yue peoples’. By this time there was a political motive to add to the economic one: the despot of a united China desired to separate the traditional families from their ancestral power bases; and the political push was renewed from time to time over the next millennium.^†

第一团结

First Unity

秦始皇（“第一位皇帝”）将秦国的统治发展^成为当时已知中华世界所有诸侯国的首位宗主国，他在诸多方面都堪称举足轻重。他在秦国统治三十七年后，转而统治中国仅十一年（公元前221-210年），但这十一年却意义非凡：除了修建长城（当时北方入侵者已是一大难题）、废除封建领主权力、开展大规模焚书运动以清除思想异端、在当时的都城长安陵墓中建造兵马俑之外，他还因推行汉字标准化而闻名，这是他推行统一法律、度量衡等政策的一部分。这意味着他要将秦国（位于遥远的西部）的本地标准强加于中国，而当时的秦国标准恰恰是最保守的标准之一。它有两种版本：一种是象形繁复的篆书，至今仍偶见于精美的铭文和官印上；另一种是笔画流畅的文书书。后者在后来的汉朝被采纳，并被徐慎编纂成册，收录于当时的词典《书文辞字》中。自此，这套文字体系便成为汉字（标准文字）的基础。

Shi Huang Di (’First Emperor’), who had converted his rule of the Qin state^§ into the first overlordship of all the known states of the Chinese world, was for many reasons a significant figure. He reigned over China for only eleven years (221-210 BC), after thirty-seven on the throne of Qin, but what years they were: besides completing the Great Wall (invaders from the north were already a problem), abolishing the power of feudal lords, carrying through an intellectual purge in a notorious rampage of book-burning, and installing the Terracotta Army in his tomb in the then capital, Chang-an, he is also famous for the standardisation of Chinese characters, as part of a general programme to introduce common laws, weights and measures. This meant imposing the local standard of his (far western) state of Qin, which happened to be one of the most conservative in use at that time. It existed in two versions, the heavily pictorial zhuànshū, ‘seal script’, still occasionally seen on ornate inscriptions and official seals, and the more cursive lìshū, ‘clerical script’. This latter was taken up under the Han empire that followed, and codified in a dictionary of the time, the Shuōwèn Jiězì of Xŭ Shèn. This system has been the basis of Chinese writing, kšishū (, ‘standard script’), ever since.

中国人意识到文言是一种共同的语言，而史诗是一种共同的文字，但他们花了一千年才开始注意到人们之间的差异：唐代早期文献（公元7世纪）谈到南方与北方在方言（即“地方方言”）上的差异，方言是方言的常用词：这逐渐成为一个相当有力的术语，后来（¹⁴）也被用来指代朝鲜语、日语、蒙古语、满语和越南语等外来语言。

Conscious of a common language in wényán and a common script in kšishū, Chinese people took a millennium to begin to notice people diverging: early Tang literature (seventh century AD) talks of the south differing from the north in its fāng-yán, ‘regional speech’, the normal word for a dialect: this came to be a pretty strong term, also to be applied (much later¹⁴) to refer to foreign languages such as Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, Manchu and Vietnamese.

中国北部和西部的马背邻邦所使用的语言与汉语所属的汉藏语系（前文已提及）并无关联。此外，它们与中国南部邻邦的语言也截然不同——这一点与汉语在类型学上也存在差异。与它们的现代后裔，即中亚所谓的阿尔泰语系^*（包括突厥语系、蒙古语系和通古斯语系）一样，这些语言都具有高度多音节性；它们的词汇，至少是名词和动词，是由一串串短音素系统地、黏着地构成。它们并非声调语言，但广泛运用元音和谐原则，词缀中的元音与词根的元音相呼应。它们的语序是动词位于句末。在这些方面，它们与汉语截然不同。汉语是一种单音节声调语言，几乎没有构词法，而且基本语序是动词在句子中位于第二个位置。

The languages spoken by China’s equestrian neighbours to its north and west were quite unrelated to the family that includes Chinese, the Sino-Tibetan languages already mentioned. Furthermore—and in this they differed from the tongues of China’s southern neighbours—they were not like Chinese typologically either. Like their modern descendants, the so-called Altaic languages^* of central Asia, including the Turkic, the Mongol and the Tungus families, they are all highly polysyllabic; their words, at least the nouns and verbs, are built up systematically and agglutinatively out of strings of short elements. They are not tone languages, but they make extensive use of the principle of vowel harmony, so that the vowels in the suffixes echo the vowels of the word’s root. Their word order places the verb at the end of the sentence. In all these respects, they are radically different from Chinese, a monosyllabic tone language with little or no word formation, and a basic order in which the verb comes second in the sentence.

匈奴^*是公元前三世纪蒙古和突厥斯坦的主要草原游牧民族。尽管他们在中国历史上扮演着重要角色，但要找到关于他们语言的证据却极其困难。然而，现存一段十个汉字的文字，记载了佛教僧人佛头登给匈奴王的一些建议。这些汉字在公元四世纪的解读可能是……

The Xiōngnú^* were the principal steppe nomads of Mongolia and Turkestan in the third century BC. Despite their major role in Chinese history it is extremely difficult to find evidence of what their language was like. There is, however, a single quotation of ten Chinese characters, giving some advice of the Buddhist monk Fotudeng to a Xiongnu king. The characters would have been read in the fourth century AD as

syog tieg t'iei liəd kāng b'uok kuk g'iw t'uk tāng。

syog tieg t’iei liəd kāng b’uok kuk g’iw t’uk tāng.

如果我们像路易·巴赞那样解读这篇文章，

If we follow Louis Bazin in reading this as

süg tägti idqang, boqughigh tutqang

派出你的军队，军阀守卫

your army send-out, warlord hold

我们可以推断，他们的语言是突厥语，而不是蒙古语或通古斯语^。15

we can infer that their language was Turkic, rather than Mongol or Tungus.¹⁵

秦、赵、燕三国都曾修建城墙以抵御匈奴入侵。秦始皇将三国并入秦朝后，城墙得以统一并加长。中国人也学会了运用骑兵战术对抗匈奴。双方的战争持续了五百年之久，在此期间，中国人成功地将蛮族拒之门外，并奉行进军政策，控制了如今的甘肃和青海等西部地区。如此一来，丝绸之路得以畅通，通往帕米尔高原的费尔干纳马场也得以进入，这对中国的防御至关重要。然而，他们的防御也依赖于维持一支活跃的边境驻军，而维持这支驻军的补给成本十分高昂。随着汉朝末年中央集权政府的瓦解，这一防御体系也随之崩溃，匈奴得以突破城墙。

Three Chinese kingdoms of the north, the Qin, the Zhao and the Yan, had each built sections of wall to keep the Xiongnu out. The walls were unified and lengthened when the Qin emperor incorporated all the kingdoms into his realm. The Chinese also learnt how to oppose the Xiongnu with their own cavalry tactics. Hostilities continued for five hundred years, and for all this time the Chinese were successful in keeping the barbarians out of China, and in maintaining a forward policy that kept control throughout the western regions now known as Gansu and Qinghai; in this way, the Silk Road was secured, as well as access to the far-away horse-breeding grounds of Ferghana by the Pamirs, vital for the Chinese defence. However, their defence also depended on maintaining an active frontier garrison, and it was a costly exercise to keep the guards supplied. When the centralised government of China broke down at the end of the Han dynasty, this failed, and it became possible for the Xiongnu to penetrate the wall.

向南撤退

Retreat to the south

随后，中国陷入混乱且日益血腥的时期，公元4世纪，众多突厥和蒙古部落为争夺北方控制权而展开激烈竞争，传统政府在北方的彻底无能也暴露无遗。其结果是，中国的统治中心南移。公元317年，南京（意为“南方之都”）建立起新的王朝，而北方则继续被不同的突厥和蒙古部落争夺。最终，从公元557年到公元557年，北方由塔布加奇王朝统治，^*他们至少在捍卫已夺取的领土方面表现出了一定的实力。这些新统治者讲突厥语，但他们很快便开始融入当地文化，并采用了“卫”这个汉名。这项政策似乎需要一些强制执行，或者至少需要鼓励：六代之后，公元500年，他们的统治者孝文颁布法令，禁止使用突厥语、穿着突厥服饰和遵守突厥习俗。

A confused and increasingly bloody period ensued, leading in the fourth century AD to open competition among a number of Turkic and Mongol hordes for control of the north, and exposing the total impotence there of the traditional government. The effect was to displace southward the centre of Chinese. In 317 a new dynasty was founded in Nánjīng, ‘Southern Capital’, while different Turkic and Mongol hordes contested the north. Ultimately, the two centuries to 557 were dominated in the north by the Tabgach,^* who at least proved effective in defending what they had won. These new lords were speakers of a Turkic language, but they soon endeavoured to take up local forms, adopting the Chinese name Wèi. This policy appears to have needed some enforcement, or at least encouragement: six generations later, in 500, their ruler, Xiaowen, outlawed by decree the Turkic language, costume and customs.

从政治和语言上看，这与当时古罗马帝国的局势颇为相似：日耳曼人占领了西欧的核心地带，试图接受汉语，但并未完全取代它；而古罗马的继承者则退守到历史上并非罗马领土的东部地区，如巴尔干半岛、希腊和安纳托利亚。然而，汉语并没有像拉丁语在东地中海地区与希腊语那样，面临来自其他语言的挑战。整个大陆，无论在哪个地区，都以汉语为主导，尽管越来越多的人说汉语时带有非常奇特的口音。

It was rather similar, politically and linguistically, to what was going on in the old Roman empire at the same time, with Germans taking over its heartland in western Europe, changing but not supplanting its language as they attempted to adopt it, and the successors of the old Roman power retrenching into what had historically been non-Roman lands in the eastern territories, the Balkans, Greece and Anatolia. Yet the Chinese language faced no competition from a potential equal, as Latin faced Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. The land, in all its parts, was dominated by Chinese, even if increasingly spoken by people with some very strange accents.

在南方，统一的中国王朝继续存在；大量富裕的中国移民逐渐将汉语传播开来。他们迁徙的部分原因是逃避侵略者，但也是为了占据长江流域更为肥沃的土地。当地居民的语言，无论是泰语系、汉藏语系还是苗瑶语系，都与汉语非常相似，尽管彼此之间往往没有亲缘关系。因此，南方学习者相对顺利地掌握了汉语：一些新出现的汉语方言，尤其是最南端的方言（称为粤语或粤语），听起来与汉语原语非常接近。

Down in the south a unified Chinese dynasty continued; there large numbers of well-to-do Chinese immigrants were gradually spreading the range of Chinese. They had moved partly to escape the invaders, but also to occupy the more fertile land drained by the Yangtze. The languages of the native population there, whether of the Tai, Sino-Tibetan or Hmong-Mien families, were all of a type quite similar, though often unrelated, to Chinese. The result was a relatively smooth take-up of Chinese by learners in the south: some of the new Chinese dialects that arose, especially the southernmost (called Yue, or Cantonese), sound very much like the original.

公元七世纪的中古汉语音节可以以m、n、ng、p、t、k或元音结尾，现代粤语也是如此，就像（与其无关但相邻的）南方语言壮语一样；在普通话中，词尾的m变成了n，而词尾的p、t和k都被省略了。据推测，中古汉语有三种声调，并且对于以p、t或k结尾的词，还有一种单独的、所谓的“入声”模式。这些声调后来分裂成八个声调，根据声调的开头是清辅音还是浊辅音，分为高声调和低声调（例如bdgzj和ptksc）。这是现代粤语和壮语声调系统的基础；普通话则走了不同的路径，只分裂了原有的声调之一，但在省略词尾的p、t和k时，它将所有受影响的词都归入了其他声调之一。它最终只有四个声调，而粤语（和壮语）有八个声调^。16

Middle Chinese of the seventh century AD had syllables that could end in m, n, ng, p, t, k or a vowel, and so does Modern Cantonese, just like the (unrelated but neighbouring) southern language Zhuang; in Mandarin final m has become n, and final p, t and k have all been dropped. Again Middle Chinese is inferred to have had three tone contours, and a separate, so-called ‘entering’, pattern for words ending in p, t or k. These later split to eight tones, with a high and a low onset, depending on whether they started with a voiced or voiceless consonant (b-d-g-z-j versus p-t-k-s-c). This is the basis of the system in modern Cantonese, and also in Zhuang; Mandarin has taken a different route, splitting only one of the original tones, but when it dropped final p, t and k it assigned all the words affected to one of the other tones. It has ended up with four tones, while Cantonese (and Zhuang) have eight.¹⁶

公元589年，中国实现了统一。隋唐两朝开启了中国新的黄金时代，虽然并非总是和平，但却繁荣昌盛。在此期间，中国人继续向南迁徙。

In 589 it proved possible to reunite the country. A new Chinese golden age, of prosperity if not always peace, began under the Sui and then the Tang dynasties. Throughout this period, Chinese continued to spread southward.

唐朝一直延续到九世纪末，最终演变为地方军阀混战的局面。在此期间，许多外来使团抵达中国，包括来自印度的佛教徒、景教基督徒、琐罗亚斯德教徒、摩尼教徒和穆斯林。这使得梵语、阿拉姆语、波斯语和阿拉伯语的发音传播到主要城市，并在宗教仪式中使用；但实际使用这些语言的人数必然寥寥无几。无论如何，到唐朝末年，除佛教徒和穆斯林外，其他外来使团几乎全部被清除。八、九世纪期间，西方的西藏入侵威胁日益加剧，西南部的云南（意为“云之南”）也遭到南诏族人的顽强抵抗，但唐朝并未长期失去领土。在这一时期（从 847 年开始），另一个突厥语族群维吾尔族也定居在北部的甘肃省，并在遥远的西部（今新疆）建立了一个与中国人友好的独立王国。

The Tang dynasty lasted until the end of the ninth century, when it degenerated into a power struggle among regional warlords. Many foreign missions reached China in this period, including Buddhists from India, Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians and Manichaeans, and Muslims. This would have spread the sounds of the Sanskrit, Aramaic, Persian and Arabic languages to the major centres, where they would have been used in worship; but the numbers actually speaking them must have remained tiny. In any case, by the end of the Tang all except the Buddhists and Muslims had been purged out of existence. During the eighth and ninth centuries there was an increasing threat of incursions from Tibet in the west, and stout resistance from the Nanzhao natives in Yúnnán (’South of the Clouds’, in the south-west) but no long-term loss of territory. This period (from 847) also saw another Turkic-speaking group, the Uighurs, settle in the northerly province of Gansu, and set up an independent kingdom, friendly to the Chinese, in the far west (modern Xinjiang).

中央政府的崩溃在半个世纪后（960年）由宋朝修复，但在此之前，极北之地、满洲以及长城以北的地区已被契丹人（蒙古族）占领；西北部的甘肃也沦陷，被讲与藏语相关的西夏人入侵。西夏人守住了这片区域；但契丹人在1115年被来自更北方的另一支队伍——女真人（通古斯语族）击败，而中国人却不明智地援助了女真人。尽管女真人采用了“金”（意为“金色”）这个汉名和称谓，但他们几乎立即背叛了盟友，在入侵了南方和北方的大片地区后，最终控制了整个黄河流域，即中国传统的中心地带。他们（像西夏人一样）一直统治着这个国家，直到被更强大的成吉思汗本人取代，成吉思汗于 1211 年率领蒙古人入侵。

The breakdown of central government was repaired after half a century (960) by the Song dynasty, but not before the extreme north, Manchuria and the lands north of the Great Wall, had been taken by the Khitan, a Mongolian tribe; Gansu too, in the north-west, was lost, invaded by the Tangut, who spoke a language related to Tibetan. The Tangut held on to this area; but the Khitan were in 1115 overwhelmed by another group from farther north—the Jurchen, a Tungus-speaking people, whom the Chinese, ill-advisedly, assisted. Although the Jurchen adopted the Chinese name and style of Jīn (, ‘golden’), they almost immediately turned on their allies and, after invading much of the south as well as the north, were left in control of the entire valley of the Huang-he, the traditional Chinese heartland. This they held (like the Tangut) until displaced by one greater, Genghis Khan himself, who led a Mongolian invasion in 1211.

一如既往，入侵者攻占北方远比攻占南方容易得多。宋朝以杭州为中心，坚守南方防线长达两代人之久，直到1279年，蒙古人先是征服了西南部的云南（以及越南北部），才得以从后方包抄宋朝。

As so often, it proved much easier for the invaders to overrun the north than the south. For two generations the Song dynasty maintained a defence of the southern empire, based on Hangzhou, until in 1279 the Mongols were able to take them in the rear, having first conquered Yunnan (and indeed the north of Vietnam) in the south-west.

历史上第一次，一个非汉语王朝（蒙古人，即现在的元朝，意为“原始”）统治了整个中国。由于蒙古人此时也控制了亚洲大部分地区，因此蒙古忽必烈汗决定将都城从蒙古的喀喇昆仑迁至北京（意为“北方之都”），这对中国来说或许是件幸事，否则中国很可能像所有殖民地一样，被统治者忽视。但无论如何，蒙古帝国的统一在1295年就瓦解了。西方新近皈依伊斯兰教的可汗拒绝承认忽必烈汗在北京的继承人是佛教徒。

For the first time, a non-Chinese speaking dynasty (Mongols, now known as the Yuán, , ‘Original’) controlled the full extent of China. Since the Mongols by this time also controlled most of the rest of Asia, it could be thought lucky for China that the Mongol Kublai Khan decided to move his capital from Kara Korum in Mongolia to Běijīng (, ‘Northern Capital’), since otherwise it might have suffered the fate of all colonies, to be disregarded by its ruler; but in any case, the unity of the Mongol empire was lost by 1295. The newly converted Muslim Khans of the west refused to accept the sovereignty of Kublai Khan’s successor at Beijing, since he was a Buddhist.

蒙古对中国的统治并未持续太久。尽管忽必烈以其彬彬有礼而闻名，但他的继任者却远逊于他。值得一提的是末代皇帝帖木儿（1333-1369），他颁布了一系列反华法令，其中包括禁止中国人读写蒙古语。显然，当时蒙古奉行的是严格的种族政策。人们或许会认为，与后来统治中国的满族，或是当时鲜为人知的英国在爱尔兰的例子相比，蒙古的^精英阶层应该会通过立法来阻止其成员学习被征服民族的语言。

Mongol control of China did not last much longer. Although Kublai was famous for his civility, his successors were less distinguished. It is worth mentioning the last of the dynasty, Togan Timur (1333-1369), since among much anti-Chinese legislation he passed laws forbidding Chinese to read or write Mongolian. It is evident that a strict racial policy was being followed. One would have expected, by comparison with the Manchu who were to follow much later—or the contemporary, but of course quite unknown, example of the English in Ireland^*—that the elite would be passing laws to prevent their own members from taking up the language of the conquered people.

1369年，帖木儿及其蒙古军队被一位深受民众爱戴的中国军阀击败，这位军阀后来成为民族英雄，并自立为明朝第一位皇帝。此后三个世纪，中国政府未受外来势力干预。

In 1369 Togan Timur and his Mongols ended up chased out by a popular Chinese warlord turned national hero, who established himself as the first Ming emperor. There was then for three centuries no interference by outsiders in the government of China.

北方的影响

Northern influences

随后，说通古斯语的女真族，也就是后来的满族，获得了第二次统治中国的机会。这次入侵是外语族群对中国最后一次永久性的渗透。

Then the Tungus-speaking Jurchen people, now to be known as the Manchus, gained a second chance to dominate China. This invasion was the last permanent penetration of China by speakers of a foreign language.

十七世纪初，满族在两位能干的领袖领导下重整旗鼓，进军中国北部边疆，在奉天（今沈阳）建立都城。1644年，两位将军争夺明朝统治权，满族趁机入主北京。他们抓住机会，建立新王朝，称其为清朝（意为“纯洁”）。到1651年，清朝已征服中国其他地区，平定所有抵抗。虽然满族人说的是自己的语言，而且这种语言在清朝灭亡前一直是官方书面语言，但到了十八世纪，即使在宫廷中，这种语言也已不再使用。满族语言甚至在满洲本土也未能幸存，成为其成功征服中国及其生活方式的又一牺牲品。如今，只有1764年从满洲首都奉天派往新疆的一支军队的后裔还在使用这种语言，它被称为“西伯语”。这是一种东北语言，现在只在中国西北部地区使用。

In the early seventeenth century, the Manchus had been reorganised, under two able leaders, and advanced into the northern marches of Chinese territory to establish a capital at Mukden. Then, in 1644, they had the luck to be invited into Beijing as a tactical move in a struggle between two generals contending to replace the Ming. The Manchus took the opportunity to install themselves, styling their new dynasty with the name Qīng (, ‘Pure’), and by 1651 had put down all resistance in the rest of China. Although they came speaking their own language, and it remained an official written language of the Chinese state until the end of the dynasty in 1911, it had died out in speech even at court by the eighteenth century. The language did not survive even in Manchuria itself, a curious victim of its people’s successful takeover of China and its way of life. Today it is only spoken, under the name of Xibo, by the descendants of a detachment of troops dispatched from the Manchurian capital Mukden to Xinjiang in 1764—a north-eastern language now spoken only in the Chinese north-west.

入侵者从北方而来，北方的汉语逐渐成为全国的标准语言。虽然北方方言经历了显著的变化，但这些变化只能部分归因于匈奴、塔布加奇、女真、蒙古或满族人在学习汉语时遇到的特殊困难。^*有趣的是，现代汉语能够区分“我们”（不包括你们）和“我们”（包括你们），就像蒙古语和满语一样；这是中古汉语之后的一项创新。或许还可以指出现代汉语中辅音连缀的缺失，而中古汉语允许使用一些辅音连缀。例如，“安抚”和“确保”分别变成了“安抚”和“确保” 。阿尔泰语系语言不允许音节开头出现多个辅音。^†

It was into the north that the invaders came, and the Chinese spoken in the north went on to become the standard language for the country. But although the northern dialect underwent significant changes, they can only partly be put down to the particular difficulties that Xiongnu, Tabgach, Jurchen, Mongol or Manchu would have encountered as they tried to get by in Chinese.^* There is the interesting fact that Mandarin Chinese can distinguish wômen, ‘we (excluding you)’, from zšnmen, ‘we (including you)’, just as Mongol and Manchu do; this is an innovation since Middle Chinese. And perhaps one can point to the absence of consonant clusters in modern Chinese, some of which were allowed in Middle Chinese. For example, sniwər, ‘appease’, and t’nwšr, ‘secure’, have become sūi and tŭo. Altaic languages cannot abide more than one consonant at the beginning of a syllable.^†

事实上，现存一些文字遗迹，展现了入侵者被同化之前某个过渡时期人们所使用的汉语。十三世纪的《蒙古秘史》汉译本就充满了阿尔泰语系的语言模式，例如用后置词代替介词、动词置于宾语之后、存在动词置于句末等等，这些在汉语中都显得十分怪异，因为汉语的基本语序更接近英语。

There are in fact a few written relics of the kind of Chinese that was spoken in one of the intermediate periods before the invaders were absorbed. The thirteenth-century Chinese translation of The Secret History of the Mongols is full of Altaic patterns such as postpositions instead of prepositions, verbs following the object, and existential verbs at the end of the sentence, all weird in Chinese, whose basic word order is much more like English:

大凡女儿生了老在嘉里德

一般女儿生下来总是呆在家里粒子

Da-fan nyu-hai-er sheng liao lao zai jia-li de

Generally daughter born past always stay home-at particle

李悟

li wu

原因并非如此

reason is-not

你的女儿没有理由一直待在家里。

There is no reason why a daughter, born to you, should always stay at home.

《子书》中有大量证据表明满语和官话混合使用。《子书》是满族人在北京早期（1736-1796 年）所享受的叙事娱乐的文字记录，尽管它的写作更多地采用了汉语词序，其中穿插着满语词汇。

And there is copious evidence for mixtures of Manchu and Mandarin in the zî-dì-shū, ‘Son’s Books’, which are a written record of the narrative entertainment the Manchu enjoyed in their early days in Beijing (1736-96), though they are written more with Chinese word order scattered with Manchu vocabulary.

在北方方言中，宾语仍然经常出现在动词之前，而“than”短语则经常出现在比较级形容词之前，这些特征可能归因于阿尔泰语系的影响。但总的来说，这种混合的汉语风格并未形成。17^后来的入侵者家庭自然而然地从他们的中国母亲、保姆和老师那里习得了汉语；或许阿尔泰语系的语言模式与汉语的差异太大，以至于无法形成任何妥协。这在汉语的语言关系中相当典型：一般来说，汉语中从其他语言借用的词汇并不多，无论从哪个方向借用，更不用说结构上的影响了；“dú”（小牛）似乎源自阿尔泰语系，这很符合阿尔泰语系民族以畜牧业为生的特点（参见蒙古语“ tuγul”、满语“ tukšan”、鄂温克语“ tukučən”，都表示“小牛”），但元代戏剧中出现的许多蒙古语词汇后来又失传了。¹⁸

In northern dialects there is still a tendency for direct objects to occur rather often before the verb, and for than-phrases to occur before comparative adjectives, features that might be attributed to Altaic influence. But in general this mixed style of Chinese did not establish itself.¹⁷ Later generations of invader families picked up Chinese naturally from their Chinese mothers, nurses and schoolmasters; probably the Altaic patterns were just too far opposed to Chinese for any compromise to develop. This is typical enough of Chinese linguistic relations: in general, there are not many loan words in Chinese borrowed from other languages in any direction, and certainly no structural influences; dú, ‘calf, does seem to have come from Altaic, characteristically enough since its peoples lived by stockbreeding (cf. Mongol tuγul, Manchu tukšan, Evenki tukučən, all meaning ‘calf), but the many Mongol words that are found in the drama of the Yuan dynasty have since been lost again.¹⁸

南海之外

Beyond the southern sea

尽管汉语在过去三千五百年中几乎完全局限于东亚，但它也曾向南方的海外地区伸出橄榄枝。在过去的一千年里，这促成了一些华人在海外的永久定居；而在过去的两个世纪里，部分原因是受到欧洲殖民的影响（或利用），一些规模可观的海外华人社区逐渐形成，这或许会对汉语未来的传播产生重要影响。

Although Chinese has spent its three and a half millennia almost wholly confined to East Asia, it did put out some feelers across the sea to its south. In the last thousand years, this led to some permanent residence of Chinese abroad; in the last two hundred, partly as a reaction to—or exploitation of—European settlement, serious overseas communities have grown up, which may be significant in the future spread of the language.

最早与中国文化接触的迹象出现在南洋，即中国人对南海沿岸的称呼——南洋，是公元前三世纪商人到访东京（今越南北部）的记录。 ¹⁹公元前111年，中国军队随后进驻，吞并了东京以及南越^*（今广西和广东）。尽管零星抵抗不断，中国对东京的统治持续了一千多年，直至公元938年。中国试图在文化上同化越南，例如向当地精英传授中国古典经典，设立科举制度选拔官员，以及官方使用文言文。中国移民涌入越南，一些人与越南王室联姻，为越南输送了许多后世领袖。唐朝传入的大乘佛教逐渐成为越南的主要宗教。 ²⁰尽管如此，汉语并未在越南这一地区永久传播开来。

The earliest inklings of Chinese in Nán-yáng, ‘the Southern Ocean’, as the Chinese called the shores of the South China Sea, are visits of merchants to Tongking (northern Vietnam) in the third century BC.¹⁹ They were followed up in 111 BC by troops, and China annexed Tongking, along with Nan-yue^* (modern Guangxi and Guangdong). China was to hold Tongking for over a thousand years, in fact until AD 938, despite sporadic and increasing resistance. China attempted to assimilate it culturally, with Chinese classics for the local elite, competitive examinations for administrators, and official use of wényán. There was Chinese immigration, and some married into Vietnam’s princely families, providing many later leaders. Mahayana Buddhism, introduced under the Tang dynasty, became the majority religion.²⁰ Despite all this, the Chinese language did not spread permanently to this part of the world.

稍晚于进军东京之后，中国人继续南下，但其意图显然更偏向学术而非物质主义。公元三世纪，两位中国使节康岱和鞠婧撰写了扶南（今柬埔寨境内）建城的报告。关于扶^南以及中国人在那里的活动，我们所知甚少；但稍晚一些，在五至八世纪，经由室利佛逝（苏门答腊岛）前往印度的路线已成为中国佛教学者的热门路线。（参见第五章“外来者的观点”，第192页。）

Somewhat later than the advance into Tongking, Chinese proceeded farther south, though apparently with instincts more scholarly than materialist. In the third century AD, two Chinese envoys, Kang Tai and Ju Ying, wrote a report on the foundation of Funan (in modern Cambodia).²¹ There is little more to be said of it, or what the Chinese were doing there; but the route via Śri Vijaya (in Sumatra) to India became quite well travelled by China’s Buddhist scholars a little later, in the fifth to eighth centuries. (See Chapter 5, ‘Outsiders’ views’, p. 192.)

八世纪之后，贸易成为中国商人的主要动机，但与中国的联系似乎主要由阿拉伯人、波斯人和印度人等外国商人维系。直到十一世纪，我们才发现中国商人筹集资金进行远征的最早记载。这发生在宋朝时期，宋朝积极支持商人的活动。此后，政府对海外扩张的支持时有动摇，元朝坚定支持，甚至在1293年入侵爪哇岛，但最终失败。明朝于1368年成功入侵爪哇岛，但更倾向于闭关锁国：私人贸易被禁止，所有联系都必须通过外交渠道进行。郑和下西洋（1405-1433年）期间，中国商人曾短暂复兴；但此后，中国商人不得不暂时转入地下活动。

After the eighth century, trade comes to the fore as a motive, but the links seem to have been maintained by foreign merchants, Arabs, Persians and Indians, and it is only in the eleventh century that we find the first reports of capital-raising by Chinese merchants to finance their own expeditions. This was under the Song dynasty, which actively backed the traders. Thereafter government support for overseas expansion wavered, the Mongol Yuan staunchly in favour, even making a failed endeavour to invade Java in 1293, the Ming who succeeded in 1368 preferring isolation: private trade was banned, and all contacts had to be made through diplomatic channels. There was a brief resurgence during the famous global voyages of Admiral Zheng-He (in the period 1405-33); but after that episode resident Chinese merchants had, for a time, to go underground.

大多数选择这种生活方式的中国人来自福建，少数来自广东。这一事实在十五世纪郑和的随船水手马欢所著的《洋岸概览》中得到了明确的记载。马欢在书中写道，爪哇岛上有两个地方，“许多广东人和漳州人居住在那里”，他还提到岛上其他地方也有许多来自福建的流亡者。22 时至今日，闽语、客家话和粤语等东南方言在海外华人的口语中仍然占据主导地位，这清楚地表明了上述事实的真实性^。^*

Most of the Chinese who had taken to this life came from Fujian, with a smaller contingent from Guangdong, a fact which is explicitly recorded in a fifteenth-century report, Yíngyái Shènglšn: The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores, by Ma Huan, one of the sailors with Zheng-He. Ma writes, of two states in Java, ‘Many people from Guangdong and Zhangzhou are staying there,’ and he mentions many other exiles from Fujian elsewhere in the island.²² The truth of this stands out very clearly in the predominance of Min, Hakka and Yue, south-eastern dialects, in the speech of overseas Chinese to this day.^*

与外国恶魔打交道

Dealing with foreign devils

从十六世纪至今，中国政府与日本及一系列欧洲列强的接触日益频繁，最终与美国展开了接触；这些接触导致了战争，并在贸易殖民地建立了外国社群。对于海外华人社群而言，其影响错综复杂：他们有时遭受中国政府旨在削弱和解除外国人武装的措施之苦；但他们也从外国人，特别是英国人，富有进取精神的新发展所带来的机遇中获益。

From the sixteenth century until the present day, the Chinese government has increasingly come into contact with Japan and a series of European powers, culminating in the first approaches of the USA; these resulted in wars, and the planting of foreign communities in trading colonies. For overseas Chinese communities, the effects were complex: they sometimes suffered from China’s measures aimed at impoverishing and disarming foreigners; but they also profited from opportunities that were provided by the foreigners’ enterprising new developments, especially those of Britain.

十六世纪初，日本海盗横行，祸患难未消。中国对日本实施禁运。为了进一步遏制日本，1522年，中国又禁止所有商船前往南洋，导致所有海外华人沦为走私犯或海盗。与此同时，欧洲探险家频繁出没于中国海域，伺机攫取贸易特权。1557年，葡萄牙人获准在澳门沿海建立一块飞地；这块飞地足以长期抵御他们的侵扰。但这却加重了海外华人的负担，他们似乎连与狡猾的欧洲海盗对抗都处于劣势。^*最终，中国于1566年解除了对中国商船前往南洋的禁令。

In the early sixteenth century, Japanese pirates were a persistent problem. China imposed an embargo on Japan. For good measure, in 1522 it also banned all commercial voyages to the Nan-yang, converting all overseas Chinese into smugglers or pirates. Meanwhile, European explorers were increasingly nosing about China’s seas, looking for trading concessions. In 1557 the Portuguese were granted an enclave on the coast at Macao; this turned out to be sufficient to fob off their intrusions in the long term. But it added a further burden to the overseas Chinese, who seemed now to be at a disadvantage even as against the dastardly European folangji;^* the ban on Chinese voyages to the Nan-yang was finally lifted in 1566.

尽管继葡萄牙之后，西班牙和荷兰的到来为早已定居东印度群岛的中国商人提供了广阔的新市场，但由于缺乏来自中国的明确支持，中国商人始终处于劣势。在菲律宾新近被西班牙占领的吕宋岛，华人分别于1602年和1639年遭到屠杀，而凶手却逍遥法外。然而，商人们开始意识到中国商人群体的重要性：1644年明朝被满清推翻后，最后的忠于明朝的势力主要集中在浙江、福建和广东的沿海地区，后来，直到1682年，他们的势力还延伸到越南和菲律宾的近海。当然，他们也为自己的忠诚付出了代价，满清政府彻底“清剿”了沿海居民，将他们迁往内陆数英里之外，以阻止他们为海员提供任何支持。或许也正因为满族入侵者通过胜利建立了合法的清朝，才使得清政府从此对海外侨胞抱有某种不信任感。这正是中国黑社会和秘密社团兴起的时期。

Although the advent of the Spanish and Dutch, following the Portuguese, provided capacious new markets for the now long-resident Chinese traders of the East Indies, lack of clear support from China meant that Chinese traders were always at a disadvantage. In Luzon, in their newly Spanish colony of the Philippines, the Chinese population was massacred in 1602 and again in 1639, with utter impunity. Nevertheless, the trader community was beginning to be seen as a useful force: when the Ming dynasty was toppled by the Manchus in 1644, the last loyalist strongholds were found in the maritime communities of Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong, and later, until 1682, offshore in Vietnam and the Philippines. They suffered for their loyalty, of course, with the Manchus literally ‘clearing the coasts’ of all their inhabitants, moving them miles inland to prevent any support to mariners. Perhaps also—since the Manchu invaders through victory became the legitimate authority, the Qing dynasty—they laid the basis for a certain distrust felt ever since by China’s central government towards its overseas community. This was the seed time for the Chinese Triads, and secret societies.

但南洋涌现出新的势力，华人也做好了从中获利的准备。1688年欧洲人被禁止进入泰国后，华人在整个十八世纪成为泰国的主要贸易商和经济顾问。他们也在马来柔佛王国站稳了脚跟。但与此同时，他们与新成立的荷兰东印度公司（VOC）勾结，找到了大量牟利的机会；以至于在1740年，他们在爪哇岛遭到荷兰人的又一次大规模屠杀。1785年，当英国人在马来半岛的槟城岛（当时还是一座荒岛）建立自己的东印度公司时，正是华人自愿前往定居。同样，在1819年后莱佛士开发新加坡的过程中，华人也发挥了重要作用。随着英国势力在马来亚和婆罗洲北部扩张，荷兰的利益向南延伸至苏门答腊、婆罗洲南部和西里伯斯岛，华人的利益也随之而来。他们非常欣赏英国的自由港制度。

But there were new forces loose in the Nan-yang, and the Chinese were ready to profit from them. When Europeans were banned from Thailand in 1688, the Chinese became its principal traders and economic consultants through the eighteenth century. They were also well ensconced in the Malay kingdom of Johore. But in the same era, they found abundant opportunities for profit in collusion with the new Dutch VOC (East India Company); so much so that they suffered another major massacre at Dutch hands, in Java in 1740. And when the British started their own East Indian enterprise, on the empty Malayan island of Penang in 1785, it was the Chinese who volunteered to populate it. Likewise, they were in the forefront in Raffles’ development of Singapore after 1819. As British power spread across Malaya and northern Borneo, and the Dutch interest farther south, into Sumatra, southern Borneo and Celebes, the Chinese interests accompanied them. They liked very well the British institution of free ports.

法国和英国的贸易利益集团对中国施加的压力与日俱增。法国的关注点在于中国在越南的殖民地，而英国则为了捍卫其在孟加拉的鸦片贸易，与清政府展开了更为直接、更为激烈的谈判：最终，清政府割让了香港（1842年，并于1860年和1898年扩大了香港的面积），并允许外国进入包括上海（1842年）在内的五个通商口岸。尽管其中最重要的几个口岸并不位于福建——中国传统的兵源地——但海外华人如今已拥有了通往大陆的可靠通道。联系日益紧密，自十七世纪以来，与大陆的直接往来首次成为海外华人贸易的重要组成部分。南阳正在回归故里。

Pressure was now building up from trading interests in France and Britain on China itself. The French concern centred on Chinese possessions in Vietnam, but the British dealt more directly, and fiercely, with the Qing government, in defence of their opium trade out of Bengal: the result was the cession of Hong Kong (1842, enlarged in 1860 and 1898) and foreign access to five more treaty ports, including Shanghai (1842). Although the most prominent of these were not in Fujian, their classic recruiting area, the overseas Chinese now had guaranteed access to the mainland. Links grew, and for the first time since the seventeenth century direct involvement with the mainland became an important part of overseas Chinese trade. Nan-yang was coming home.

为什么以及原因

Whys and wherefores

既然我们已经考察了埃及和中国的完整历史进程，我们就可以考虑是什么主要特性可以解释它们在面对时间和入侵时所表现出的不可动摇的稳定性。

Now that we have surveyed the full course of the histories of Egyptian and Chinese, we can consider what the major properties could be which might explain their unshakeable stability in the face of time and invasion.

某些显而易见的可能性可以立即排除，因为在这些可能性中，埃及和中国处于截然相反的极端。

Certain obvious possibilities can be eliminated at once, since in them Egyptian and Chinese are at opposite extremes.

从最明显的语言学角度来看，埃及语和汉语的结构类型截然不同，它们在语言发展史上也朝着不同的方向发展。从更抽象的角度来看，它们在语言环境的另一个方面也存在显著差异：即它们与邻近语言的相似程度或差异程度。

In the most evident linguistic aspect, the structural type of their languages, Egyptian and Chinese were intrinsically always very different, and have developed in different directions over their recorded histories. And looking at them a little more abstractly, we can see too that they were also quite unlike in another aspect of their linguistic environments: their degree of similarity or difference to their neighbouring languages.

埃及语在其漫长的历史中始终是一种高度屈折变化的语言，拥有复杂的动词形态和灵活的词序。尽管在数千年的发展过程中，它也逐渐演变成一种更具分析性的语言结构，例如可分离的冠词和人称代词成为名词和动词短语的组成部分，以及更为严格的词序。此外，那些可能影响或取代埃及语的语言，尤其是利比亚语和阿拉姆语，在类型学上与埃及语非常相似——正如它最终的对手阿拉伯语一样。从语言结构的角度来看，无论是绝对的还是相对的，似乎都没有任何理由可以解释埃及语的稳定性。

Egyptian remained throughout its history a highly inflected language with complex verbal morphology, and flexible word order, though it did develop somewhat over the millennia into a more analytic structure, with separable articles and personal pronouns becoming constituents of noun and verb phrases, and more rigid word order. Furthermore, the languages that might have been expected to influence or replace it, especially Libyan and Aramaic, were typologically similar to it—just as was its ultimate nemesis, Arabic. There seems no reason in linguistic structure, absolute or relative, to explain its stability.

相比之下，古汉语是孤立语的极端例子，其词根为单音节词，并带有明显的声调特征，大多作为独立词使用，词序是句法中最重要的方面。同样，几千年来汉语也发生了一些变化：但其分析性逐渐降低，词汇量增加，这些词汇是在原本可分离的词根基础上发展而来的，一些词根演变为语法语素，用于标记复数、主谓系词或关系从句等。与受到同类型语言挑战的埃及语不同，汉语面临的威胁来自阿尔泰语系，正如我们所见，这些语言在本质上与埃及语截然不同。事实上，在与同类型语言接触的地区（南方），汉语是外来语言，并倾向于取代它们。

Old Chinese, by contrast, was an extreme example of an isolating language, its roots, monosyllabic and marked with significant tone patterns, largely functioning as independent words, and using word order as the most significant aspect of syntax. Again, there was some change visible over the millennia: but Chinese moved to become less analytic, with longer words developing on the basis of the previously detachable roots, and some of the roots changing into grammatical morphemes, marking such things as plurality, copular links between subject and predicate, or markers of relative and subordinate clauses. Unlike Egyptian, which was challenged by languages of its own type, the threat to Chinese came from the Altaic languages, which were, as we have seen, fundamentally different in type. In fact, where it was in contact with languages of similar type (in the south), Chinese was the incoming language, and tended to replace them.

宗教观念是文化的另一个重要方面，我们可以从中寻找文化稳定性的线索，而这种稳定性或许会反映在语言中。我们已经看到（第三章，“第二幕间奏：信仰的盾牌”，第86页），尤其在中东，对宗教的依恋能够使一种语言在逆境中得以保存。但在这方面，埃及和中国又出现了分歧。

Religious outlook is another important aspect of cultures, where we might look for a clue to their stability, which might then be reflected in language. We have seen (Chapter 3, ‘Second interlude: The shield of faith’, p. 86) that especially in the Middle East attachment to a religion could preserve a language against the odds. But here again, Egypt and China diverged.

对埃及人来说，来世信仰至关重要：他们刻意将陵墓建成建筑环境中最为永久的部分，而且在他们的文献中，我们发现他们对死后世界、审判和个人生存等问题充满了浓厚的兴趣。当然，在埃及语的大部分存续时期，他们都保留了自己的宗教信仰，而且在扩张势力范围时，他们传播宗教的力度并不比推广埃及语更大。然而，即便没有埃及语的传播，他们的信仰仍然有所扩散：他们的母神伊西斯成为罗马帝国最受尊崇的神祇之一，并被视为基督教圣母玛利亚崇拜的起源。颇具讽刺意味的是，当基督教镇压埃及宗教时，埃及语却以基督教当地语言的身份获得了新生。埃及宗教无疑有利于埃及语的存续，但两者在埃及语最终消亡之前就已分道扬镳。

Faith in an afterlife was important to Egyptians: they deliberately made their tombs the most permanent part of their built environment, and we find them in their literature very much concerned with what they could know about life after death, judgement and individual survival. Certainly they preserved their religion for most of the lifespan of their language, and they no more actively preached it abroad than they attempted to spread their language when they enlarged the boundaries of their power. But aspects of their faith did spread without the language none the less: their mother-goddess Isis became one of the most widely revered deities in the Roman empire, and has been seen as a root of the Christian cult of Mary as Mother of God. And paradoxically, when the Christians suppressed the Egyptian cult, Egyptian as a language took on a new life as the local language of Christianity. Egyptian religion was certainly favourable to the survival of the Egyptian language, but the two became detached long before the end.

中国人对宗教的态度截然不同，主要以务实为特征。当时主要有两种宗教传统。一种遵循孔子（孔夫子），对美德的定义高度社会化和世俗化；另一种遵循老子和庄子的“道”，力求与自然规律相契合。除了流行的万物有灵论之外，在公元第一个千年佛教从印度传入之前，中国人对来世的渴望几乎得不到任何满足。（对中国人而言，佛教是一种西方宗教。）佛教在三、四、五世纪的动荡时期蓬勃发展，并在唐朝成为国教，唐朝恢复了强大的普世政府；巴利语和梵语经典被翻译成中文，佛教逐渐融入中国社会。

The Chinese attitude to religion was very different, mostly characterised by down-to-earth practicality. There were two major traditions. One followed Confucius (Kung Fu-zi, ‘Master Kung’), taking a highly socialised and worldly definition of virtue; the other followed the Dào (, ‘way’) of Lao-zi and Zhuang-zi, seeking to merge with the patterns discerned in nature. Aside from popular animist beliefs, no fulfilment of any Chinese yearnings for another world was available until Buddhism began to penetrate from India in the first millennium AD. (This, for the Chinese, was a Western religion.) It prospered in the troublous times of the third, fourth and fifth centuries, and then became the established faith of the Tang dynasty that returned strong universal government to China; the Pali and Sanskrit classics were translated in Chinese, and Buddhism became a naturalised Chinese faith.

佛教强调苦难、顺从以及对日常生活的漠然，这对于那些必须抵御外敌入侵、保卫领土的君主而言，从来都不是积极的影响。在其发源地印度，没有一位佛教君主，即使是阿育王，也未能建立一个延续超过两代的王朝；而佛教对入侵的阿尔泰民族，尤其是塔布加奇人和成吉思汗的蒙古人，有着一种奇特的吸引力，这使得他们在定居中国后，其尚武精神很快消逝。正如格鲁塞所言：“这些凶猛的战士，一旦受到菩萨的恩典，便会变得如此容易受到沙门（即佛教僧侣）的人道主义戒律的影响，以至于不仅忘记了他们与生俱来的好战天性，甚至连自卫都变得麻木了。” ²³

Buddhism, with its emphasis on suffering, resignation and the ultimate unimportance of the daily round of life, was never a positive influence on kings who must preserve their realms against external aggression. No Buddhist king in its homeland of India, not even Aśoka, managed to found a dynasty that would endure more than a couple of generations; and the strange attraction of Buddhism to invading Altaic peoples, especially the Tabgach and Genghis Khan’s Mongols, brought their soldierly virtues to an early end once they had settled in China. As Grousset remarks: ‘These ferocious warriors, once touched by the grace of the bodhisattva, became so susceptible to the humanitarian precepts of the śramanas [i.e. Buddhist monks] as to forget not only their native belligerence but even neglect their self-defence.’²³

但埃及和中国的宗教有一个相似之处，这或许与它们的语言在数千年间得以在原地流传至今密切相关。那就是它们对各自皇帝的态度，以及皇帝与国家、人民和神灵之间的关系。

But there was one aspect of Egyptian and Chinese religion which was similar, and is probably connected with the gross survivability of their languages in situ over many millennia. This is the attitude that each of them took to their emperor, and his relation to his land, his people and their gods.

这两个帝国都曾在一位君主的统治下早期实现统一：埃及在传说中的美尼斯统治下，中国在历史上的秦始皇统治下。尽管此后王国之间时常出现分裂和竞争，但这两个文明都无法容忍这种分裂：正如我们所见，它们的历史清晰地区分了繁荣时期（一个王室统治整个国家）和无政府状态（虽然表面上和平，但却存在国家分裂的根本缺陷）。这两个国家都高度中心化，而这个中心并非某个地点（它们都曾有过许多不同的都城——埃及的底比斯、孟菲斯、塔尼斯、利昂托波利斯、赛斯；中国的长安、洛阳、南京、杭州、北京），而是王室宫廷。在这两个国家，国王的地位都^因民族信仰而神圣化。埃及法老被视为王权的化身，代表着两国人民与神灵保持着直接的联系。同样，中国皇帝是天子，保证了中央王国的秩序。

Both these empires achieved early unity under a single ruler, Egypt under the legendary Menes, China under the historical Shi Huang Di. Although afterwards there were often divisions, and competition among the different kingdoms, the two civilisations never found such disunity tolerable: their histories, as we have seen, distinguished firmly between prosperous periods, when a single royal house controlled the whole country, and interregna, which may have been perfectly peaceable, but suffered from the cardinal flaw that the country was divided. These were very much centred countries, and the centre was not a place (each of them had many different imperial capitals—Thebes, Memphis, Tanis, Leontopolis, Sais in Egypt, Chang-an, Luoyang, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Beijing in China) but a royal court. In each case, the king’s position^* was sanctified by the national faith. The Egyptian pharaoh was seen as the incarnation (am) of kingship, maintaining a direct relation with the gods on behalf of all his people of the Two Lands. Likewise the Chinese emperor was Son of Heaven (tiān zî), guaranteeing order in the Central Kingdom.

两位统治者都拥有绝对权力，他们的主权并非来自人民，而是来自神明。然而，他们都受到明确的道德约束。在埃及，这种约束被称为“玛拉特”（maR'at），意为“秩序”，即道德和自然法则。法老有义务在他的王国中以“玛拉特”取代“贾兹法特” （jazfat），意为“错误”。中国皇帝有义务公正统治，避免压迫；根据孟子影响深远的学说，只有做到这一点，他才能保有“天命”（tiān mìng），即统治的合法性：压迫人民的统治者丧失了统治的合法性，可以被人民依法废黜。

Both rulers were absolute, deriving their sovereignty not from the people but the gods. Nevertheless each was subject to an explicit moral constraint. In Egypt, this was called maR ‘at, ‘order’, the moral and natural law. The pharaoh had a duty to put maR ‘at in place of jazfat, ‘wrong’, in his kingdom. The Chinese emperor had a duty to rule justly, and abstain from oppression; only so long as he did this, according to the influential doctrine of Mencius (Meng-zi), could he retain the Mandate of Heaven (tiān mìng), i.e. legitimacy: the oppressive ruler had forfeited his right to rule, and could be justly deposed by the people.

因此，埃及和中国都拥有同样简单却又根深蒂固的政治理论，即国家认同建立在单一皇帝的统治之上，而皇帝的主权又建立在正义之上。这种民族哲学蕴含着内在的神义论：统治者正义的证明在于他能否成功维系王朝的统治。神明确保只有正义的君主才能获得成功，因此，无论君主是成功还是失败，世界都安然无恙，埃及或中国的公民，无论是新近迁徙而来还是久居于此，都可以对这一体制表达忠诚。

Both Egypt and China, therefore, had the same simple but sustaining political doctrine, which based the country’s identity on the rule of a single emperor, and based the emperor’s sovereignty on righteousness. The national philosophy therefore contained a built-in theodicy: the proof of a ruler’s righteousness was his success in maintaining a ruling dynasty. The gods were ensuring that only righteous monarchs would be successful, and so, whether the king was failing or prospering, all was right with the world, and the Egyptian or Chinese citizen, whether recent interloper or long-standing resident, could give the system his loyalty.

这种理论极其适用于长期稳定的文化，并带来了我们所看到的语言后果。但也有人认为，它是文化稳定的结果，而非原因。至少从更客观、更直接的角度来看，人口密度这一事实同样具有启发意义。

This doctrine was extemely fitting for a stable long-term culture, with the linguistic consequences that we have seen. But it could be maintained that it was the result, rather than the cause, of the culture’s stability. At least as revealing, from a more outward, objective point of view, is the gross fact of population density.

从绝对面积上看，埃及和中国截然不同。尽管两国历史长河浩瀚，但人口和国土面积却相差甚远。据估计，古埃及古王国时期人口约为200万，在罗马征服前的三千年间增长至800万。其居住区，即尼罗河谷和法尤姆地区，面积约3万平方公里。相比之下，中国的人口普查数据（最早可追溯至公元2世纪）显示，当时人口为5700万，到公元1000年超过8000万，到20世纪初已超过12亿。长城以内的中国（不包括内蒙古、满洲以及人口稀少的西部地区，如甘肃和青海）面积约为450万平方公里。^汉语和中国历史的拥护者数量是埃及的五十倍，其活动范围更是埃及的150倍。

In absolute size, Egypt and China are very different. Although they are comparable in terms of their duration, their populations and areas are of quite different orders. Egypt’s population in ancient times has been estimated at 2 million in the Old Kingdom, rising to 8 million over the three thousand years to the Roman conquest. The area inhabited, the Nile valley and the Fayyum, encompasses about 30,000 square kilometres. By contrast, Chinese census figures (first available in AD 2) show 57 million, rising to over 80 million in 1000, and over 1200 million at the recent turn of the millennium. The area of ‘China inside the Wall’ (excluding Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, and western areas such as Gansu and Qinghai, always very sparsely inhabited) amounts to some 4.5 million square kilometres.²⁴ The Chinese language, and Chinese history, has had fifty times more adherents than Egyptian, and 150 times the space in which to act.

然而，这立刻引出了它们的另一个共同点——人口密度高。根据埃及的数据，人口密度在这一时期从每平方公里65人上升到250人。中国的地理环境则更为多样；然而，人口普查数据使我们能够从整体上了解一些情况：汉代数据显示，黄河流域的人口密度为每平方公里58人，长江下游流域为每平方公里12人。一千年后，即公元1250年，运河连接了这两个水系，更重要的是，北方遭受了匈奴、塔布加奇、契丹、女真和蒙古的入侵：在此期间，黄河流域的人口减少了45%，而长江北岸的人口增加了176%，南岸的人口更是增长了两倍（337%）。这使得中国这两个地区的密度大致相当，每平方公里30-40头；然而，这两个地区的密度均不到尼罗河沿岸密度的一半。 ²⁵与之相比，君士坦丁时代（公元4世纪） ²⁶意大利的密度估计为每平方公里20头，安纳托利亚东部的密度估计为每平方公里19头。^*

This immediately leads, however, to another aspect that they do have in common—high density of population. From the figures quoted for Egypt, the population density would be 65 rising to 250 per square kilometre over the period. China is much more varied in its environments; however, the census figures make it possible to abstract a little from the situation in the country as a whole: in the Han period they show a density of 58 per square kilometre in the valley of the Huang-he, and 12 per square kilometre in the lower valley of the Yangtze. A millennium later, in 1250, canals linked the two river systems, and more importantly the north had sustained invasions from Xiongnu, Tabgach, Khitan, Jurchen and Mongol: in this period, the lower Huang-he population had declined by 45 per cent, whereas on the northern bank of the Yangtze it had increased by 176 per cent and twice that (337 per cent) on the southern bank. This puts the two regions of China much on a par, with 30-40 per square kilometre; each, however, less than half the density found on the Nile.²⁵ Compare this with the densities in the age of Constantine (fourth century AD)²⁶ estimated for Italy—20 per square kilometre—and for eastern Anatolia—19.^*

以古代标准来看，埃及和中国的人口密度确实非同寻常。这也必然有助于其语言的长期稳定。人口稠密地区庞大的使用者群体使其语言免受外来语言的冲击，即便他们无法阻止外来者入境。人口优势巩固了语言本身的地位，而文化声望和君主制这一由上天认可的稳固制度也为其增添了力量。

By ancient standards, then, the density of population in Egypt and China was something truly exceptional. This too must have supported the long-term stability of their languages. The sheer numbers of speakers in their populated regions gave them immunity against swamping by incomers speaking foreign languages, even when they could not deny them entry. Strength in numbers reinforced languages already buttressed by their cultural prestige, and the robust institution of a monarchy endorsed by heaven.

埃及人和中国人的自给自足和坚韧不拔的性格在许多情况下都得以体现，尤其是在他们或其使用者不得不与外国人及其语言传统互动时。这些人口稠密、中央集权的社会并非总是不受外来影响，即便是在他们自身语言的表达和使用方面也是如此。但数千年来，他们拥有足够的平衡能力，或者说足够的惯性，足以将外来者置于自身文化的控制之下。

The self-sufficient, resilient character of Egyptian and Chinese is revealed in many situations where they, or their speakers, had to interact with foreigners and their linguistic traditions. These dense, centralised societies were not always impervious to foreign influence, even in the representation and use of their own languages. But for millennia they had sufficient equipoise, or sufficient inertia, to keep the outsiders under their own cultural control.

在本章余下部分，我们将探讨外国人必然对其文化产生影响的三个方面：文字的历史、他们对外国势力的认知和态度，以及他们对入侵的回应。在所有这些方面，语言的持续传承都依赖于一种坚决拒绝以他人的视角看待自己或以他人的方式行事的信念。

In the remainder of this chapter, we shall consider three aspects of their cultures where foreigners were bound to have an impact: the history of writing, their knowledge of and attitudes to foreign powers, and their responses to invasion. In every case, the languages’ steady continuity depended on a resolute refusal to see themselves, or conduct themselves, on others’ terms.

坚持使用一套写作体系

Holding fast to a system of writing

效法你的父亲和先祖……看，他们的言语都写在纸上。打开它，你就能阅读并抄录智慧。熟练者方能学识渊博。

Copy thy father and thy ancestors … Behold their words remain in writing. Open, that thou mayest read and copy wisdom. The skilled man becomes learned.

致梅里卡雷国王的训诫，第35行（埃及，公元前20世纪中期）²⁷

Instruction for King Merikare, line 35 (Egyptian, mid-twentieth century BC)²⁷

Shu bùjìn yán yán bùjìn yì

Shū bùjìn yán yán bùjìn yì

文字无法表达所有词语，词语也无法涵盖所有思想。

Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.

《易经》西则

（孔子著），i.12（公元前五世纪之前的中国）

Yi Jīng (Classic of Changes), Xì Cí Appendix

(attrib. Confucius), i.12 (Chinese, pre-fifth century BC)

埃及的文字系统很奇特，因为它没有已知的先例。最早的象形文字铭文出现在印章、化妆品调色板、墓志铭和纪念碑上，虽然篇幅可能很短，但其结构却十分完整，并沿用了此后3500年之久。它们使用图画进行语音表达，使图画中词语的特征辅音承担多种功能，例如，一把刀的图画在英语中不仅代表“刀”（knife），还代表“niffy”（指某种东西）、“nephew”（指侄子）和“enough”（指足够）。然而，这种独特的风格在文字出现之前的艺术家创作的插图中就已经初见端倪，这表明该系统是在本土基础上建立起来的^。28

Egypt’s writing system is strange in that it has no known precursors. The first hieroglyphic inscriptions, on seals, cosmetics palettes, epitaphs and monuments, though they may be short, are well formed in the system that was to persist for the next 3500 years. They use pictures phonetically, making an illustrated word’s characteristic consonants do multiple duty, as if a picture of a knife were to stand in English not just for ‘knife’, but also for ‘niffy’, ‘nephew’ and ‘enough’. Nevertheless, the characteristic style is prefigured in illustrations made by artists before the advent of writing, suggesting that the system was set up on an indigenous basis.²⁸

人们通常认为，文字的灵感来源于美索不达米亚。几百年前，美索不达米亚人利用类似的语音原理，从会计记账发展出了文字。古老的贸易路线沿着瓦迪阿拉巴河谷连接着尼罗河谷和红海。我们或许可以推测，文字的起源可能要归功于像塞阔雅这样的天才人物。这位不识字的切罗基人在公元19世纪将英语的普及视为一种理念的证明，并从零开始为自己的语言创造了一套音节文字。

The usual assumption is that the inspiration came from Mesopotamia, where writing had developed out of accounting tallies, using similar principles of phonetics, a few hundred years before. There were ancient trade routes along the Wadi Araba which connected the Nile valley with the Red Sea, and for all we know the origin may have been due to a genius like that of Sequoya, the illiterate Cherokee who in the nineteenth century AD took the fact of English literacy as a proof of concept, and proceeded then to develop a syllabary for his own language from first principles.

无论如何，这套文字系统很快就被标准化为埃及风格的插图。虽然日常使用中发展出了象形文字的草书形式，但用于纪念碑铭文的文字却保持着严格的图像精确性。即便埃及人使用的材料——墙壁上的颜料或用毛笔在纸莎草纸上涂抹的墨水——本可以允许风格上的完全自由发挥，他们仍然坚持这种做法。流畅优美的书法从未在埃及出现。埃及抄写员严谨的书写方式与汉字或玛雅文字等文字系统的大师们截然不同。

However it was, the system was immediately standardised in an Egyptian style of illustration. Although cursive forms of the hieroglyphs were developed for daily uses, a rigid pictorial exactitude was kept up for monumental inscriptions. This was maintained despite the fact that the materials used by the Egyptians, paint on walls or ink on papyrus laid on with a brush, would have permitted total freedom of style. The practice of fluid, stylish calligraphy never began in Egypt. In their steadfast approach, Egyptian scribes were very different from the masters of such systems as Chinese characters or Mayan glyphs.

此外，尽管不时会添加新的象形文字，但其基本原则——即在图画中巧妙运用辅音双关，并通过更多图画来阐明词义和发音范围——始终未变。我们在西奈半岛的采石场遗址发现了尝试使用象形文字建立字母的实验性记录；最终，他们的贸易伙伴腓尼基人对其中一小部分符号进行了彻底的改造，创造了自己的字母表，这显然是当今世界所有字母表的起源。然而，尽管一些外来者从中汲取了灵感，但埃及人自己却从未修改过象形文字系统来书写自己的语言。

Furthermore, although new hieroglyphs were added from time to time, the basic principle of the script, the punning use of the consonants in words pictured, clarified by the use of more pictures to determine the range of meaning and sound, did not change. We find experimental uses of the hieroglyphs to found an alphabet at quarry sites in the Sinai peninsula; and ultimately radically new uses were made of a small set of the symbols by their trading partners, the Phoenicians, to found their alphabet, the apparent progenitor of all the alphabets in the world today. But while some of these foreigners were taking perverse inspiration from them, the Egyptians themselves never modified the hieroglyphic system to write their own language.

这种对文字改革的抵制，中国人也有同样的特征，实际上只能说明这些文化——无论从区域还是全球标准来看——都早已将文字稳定地融入到他们的生活方式中。在这样一个识字率极高的行政体系中，要求更换文字系统并不比现代英语中各种拼写改革的尝试更可行。只有当教育和行政体系遭到严重破坏，导致传承断裂，一切重新开始时，这种改革才有可能实现。这种情况在埃及从未发生过，直到这个国家被拥有不同行政传统的波斯、希腊和罗马文化所征服。之后，埃及文字在行政管理中的使用受到削弱，并被阿拉姆语和希腊语所取代。即便如此，也只有当基督教为识字提供了全新的用途时，埃及人才能够实现使用现成的字母文字书写的飞跃。在中国，尽管1905年废除了作为中央教育和行政机构的科举制度，尽管20世纪上半叶人们对汉字制度的未来进行了各种激进的推测，甚至包括中华人民共和国批准了一种新的罗马化系统——拼音（本书通篇使用），但中国从未真正转变为字母书写。

This resistance to script reform, a trait shared by the Chinese, really shows no more than that these cultures had already—both very early by regional and global standards—achieved a stable incorporation of writing into their way of life. Asking for a replacement of the writing system in such a literate administration was no more practicable than the various attempts to introduce spelling reform into modern English. It could only become feasible if the systems of education and administration were so severely disrupted that the succession was broken, and a new start could be made. This never happened in Egypt until the country was taken over by cultures with rival administrative traditions, Persian, Greek and Roman. Then the use of Egyptian in administration was undermined, and replaced by Aramaic and Greek. But even so, it was only when Christianity provided a whole new use for literacy that Egyptian could make the leap to writing in a ready-made, alphabetic script. In China, the change to alphabetic writing has never happened at all, despite the 1905 abolition of the imperial examination system, which had indeed been the central educational and administrative institution, and despite all the radical speculation about the future of the character system in the first half of the twentieth century, which had even included the People’s Republic’s authorisation of a new system for romanisation, Pinyin (used throughout this book).

从有文字记载的最早时期起，埃及抄写员扎·拉乌就代表着雄心壮志的巅峰。这一点在抄写学校所抄写的文本类型中得到了充分的证实：

The Egyptian scribe, zaRaw, represented from the earliest documented times the acme of ambition. This is amply confirmed by the kinds of texts that were copied in the scribal schools:

看哪，没有哪个行业不受约束；

只有博学之士才能约束自己^。29

Behold there is no profession which is not governed;

It is only the learned man who rules himself.²⁹

开始工作，成为一名书记官吧，因为那样你将成为众人的领袖。

书记官是一个尊贵的职业；他的书写工具和书卷能带来愉悦和财富^。30

Set to work and become a scribe, for then thou shalt be a leader of men.

The profession of scribe is a princely profession; his writing materials and his rolls of books bring pleasantness and riches.³⁰

在《行业讽刺诗》中，作者自夸道：

In the Satire on Trades, the scribe boasts:

我从未见过派雕塑家出使大使馆，

也从未见过青铜铸造师率领使团。

I have never seen a sculptor sent on an embassy,

nor a bronze-founder leading a mission.

这种自满情绪滋生了极端保守主义，而这最终或许正是埃及走向衰亡的原因。即使在最后一个独立的埃及国家灭亡之后，识字能力仍然仅限于少数受过高等教育的阶层，事实上，直到基督教徒将希腊字母应用于埃及语，情况才有所改变：而地中海其他地区，包括亚述人和巴比伦人，早在千年之前就已经采用了字母书写。

This complacency generated an extreme conservatism that may ultimately have been Egypt’s undoing. Literacy in Egyptian remained the preserve of a small and highly educated caste long after the demise of the last independent Egyptian state, in fact until the Christians adapted the Greek alphabet for the language: this step was taken fully a thousand years after the rest of the Mediterranean, including the Assyrians and Babylonians, had adopted alphabetic writing.

然而，仿佛是为了表明在字母时代，象形文字系统并没有自然的生命周期，汉语象形文字系统甚至在二十世纪的动荡中幸存了下来。自公元前三世纪秦始皇将这套已有千年历史的系统标准化以来，它基本保持不变，尽管书写方式有所简化。这套系统为每个词语或词根在一个假想的方框内，设定了一个特定的程式化图形，或称音韵双关加限定词的组合。一旦确立，它对语音的依赖程度就低于埃及象形文字系统，因此，在随后两千五百年间语言语音的变化对其实际应用的影响更小。博学的中国学者或许会饶有兴致地旁观外国人为了创造日语假名（两套各包含48个简化字形的字母，旨在代表日语全部音节）和韩语汉字（一种真正的表音文字，但其设计目的是为了与汉字在纸面上协调一致）而进行的修改、删减和增补。这两种文字都是针对汉字与其各自语言（多音节、黏着语和非声调语言）不匹配的问题而提出的独创解决方案——但对汉语本身而言，这似乎并非什么问题。

But as if to show that there is no natural term to the life of a pictographic system in an alphabetic age, the Chinese system has survived even the turmoil of the twentieth century. It has persisted, essentially unchanged despite some simplification in penmanship, since Shi Huang Di’s imposed standardisation in the third century BC of a system that was already over a millennium old. This system established a particular stylised picture, or a combination of phonetic pun plus determiner, in a notional square box, for each word or root in the language. Once established, it was less phonetically based than the Egyptian system, and so its practical use was even less affected by the phonetic changes in the language that have come about over the following two and a half millennia. Scholarly Chinese will have watched with amused unconcern the modifications, truncations and additions conceived by foreigners to produce the Japanese kana—two sets of forty-eight simplified outlines chosen to represent the full set of Japanese syllables—and the Korean han-gŭl—a true phonetic alphabet, but designed to harmonise on the page with Chinese characters. Each was an original solution to the poor match between Chinese characters and their own polysyllabic, agglutinative and non-tonal languages—but this must have seemed no problem for Chinese itself.

事实上，在过去的2500年里，中国人接触过许多字母文字，这些文字的出现与汉字本身并无太大关联。佛教徒从印度带来了悉达多版本的婆罗米字母，而皈依伊斯兰教的西方民族也带来了阿拉姆语和阿拉伯语的变体。蒙古皇帝忽必烈汗甚至为他的帝国制定了一种字母文字，作为所有书面语言——蒙古语、汉语、突厥语和波斯语——的官方文字。这种文字名为八思巴文，以藏文婆罗米字母为基础，于1269年颁布。它是藏文的一种变体，采用竖写方式（与汉字从左到右的竖列书写不同），并且为了迎合中国人的审美，采用了较为方正的字形。然而，八思巴文从未流行起来，并在一个世纪后随着蒙古王朝的覆灭而废止。

In fact, in the last two and a half millennia the Chinese have become aware of a number of alphabetic scripts, conceived quite independently of their characters. The Buddhists brought the Siddha version of the Brahmi alphabet from India, and the Muslims who converted many of the Western peoples brought variants of the Aramaic scripts and Arabic. The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan even commissioned an alphabetic script for his empire, to be used officially for all its literate languages, Mongolian, Chinese, Turkic and Persian. Called ‘Phagspa, it was based on the Tibetan version of Brahmi, and promulgated in 1269. It was a version of the Tibetan script converted to be written vertically (though unlike Chinese characters in columns from left to right), and in deference to Chinese taste in rather a squared-off form. However, it never caught on, and was discontinued, along with the Mongolian dynasty, just a century later.

汉字体系的最大优势在于它巧妙地展现了所有汉语方言（其中许多方言彼此无法互通）所共有的结构和意义的最高共同要素。所有现代方言，包括文言文，都建立在一套共同的、有意义的音节之上。这些音节在不同的方言中发音和组合顺序可能有所不同，但在书写形式上仍然清晰可辨。总的来说，每个音节在书写中都用一个汉字来表示，因此，对于任何识字的汉语方言使用者来说，汉字文本的含义都相对清晰。任何基于语言发音的字母文字，都不可能像汉字那样在所有不同的汉语方言之间保持如此便捷的中立性，除非它是根据历史原则，并充分了解所有汉语变体而设计的。如此精妙的设计必然需要极高的技巧和丰富的内涵。因此，汉字得以流传至今。

The great advantage of the Chinese system is its masterly representation of the highest common factor of structure and meaning shared by all the Chinese dialects, many of which are not mutually comprehensible. All the modern dialects, and wényán as well, are built on a common set of meaningful syllables, which may be pronounced and strung together in different orders in the various dialects, but are still recognisable in graphic form. By and large, every one of these syllables is represented in writing by a single character, and so the meaning of a written Chinese text will be relatively clear to any literate speaker of any dialect. No alphabetic script, based perforce on the sounds of a language, could now be so conveniently neutral in terms of all the different Chinese dialects, unless perhaps it were designed on historical principles with a knowledge of all varieties of Chinese. Such a tour de force would have to be a miracle of subtlety and ambiguity. And so the traditional characters survive.

尽管学习这套体系十分困难，但在中国，识字不再像在埃及那样是精英的专属。识字水平会根据家庭的财富和机遇而有所不同，但贫困家庭也偶尔会涌现出知识精英。识字技能在中国依然受到重视，但其价值更多地体现在实用层面。因此，埃及文士的地位在中国社会更接近于科举考试高阶毕业生的地位。科举考试从公元622年至1905年间，大致每三年举行一次。

Despite the difficulty of learning the system, in China mere literacy did not remain the elite accomplishment it always was in Egypt. Different levels would have been attained according to the wealth and opportunities of the family, but poor families continued to throw out the occasional intellectual star. Literacy skills were still prized in China, but at a higher functional level. So the status of the scribe in Egypt corresponds in Chinese society more with that of graduates of the higher levels of the imperial competitive examinations. These were held by and large every third year from AD 622 to 1905.

就书写而言，中国唯一可能从外国人那里借鉴的并非书写本身，而是发音分析。传统的韵音系统根据汉字的声母和韵音加声调来划分发音，而韵学则进一步对这些组成部分进行语音上的细分。这一公元七八世纪中国学者的发明，很大程度上受到了源自佛教传统的梵语语音分析的深刻影响。 ³¹即便如此，将汉字音节的韵音部分分解为半元音、元音和辅音的分析，也直到十九、二十世纪字母化，特别是罗马化之后才得以实现。 ³²

The only possible Chinese adoption from foreigners in respect of writing concerns not writing itself, but the analysis of pronunciation. The traditional fšnqiè system classifies a character’s pronunciation in respect of its initial consonant and its rhyme plus tone, but the déngyùn-xué “study of graded rhymes” sub-classifies these constituent parts phonetically. This invention of Chinese scholars of the seventh and eighth centuries AD came about very much under the influence of the subtle phonetic analysis of the Sanskrit pronunciation, derived from the Buddhist tradition.³¹ Even so, the analysis of the rhyme part of a character-syllable into its constituent semi-vowels, vowels and consonants had to await the more thoroughgoing approach of alphabetisation, and specifically romanisation, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.³²

因此，尽管意识到外国人正在使用更简单的文字系统，埃及和中国的象形文字系统显然不愿继续朝着简化方向发展。这些文明的建立基于对传统的尊重，尤其是对跻身掌握政权的文盲阶层这一传统困境的尊重。

There was, then, a clear reluctance to continue the development of Egyptian and Chinese pictographic systems in the direction of reducing their complexity, despite awareness of simpler systems that foreigners were using. The civilisations were built around respect for tradition, and in particular the traditional difficulties in joining the literate class, who held the reins of government.

外交关系

Foreign relations

埃及和中国对邻国以及更远的世界地区大多缺乏积极的态度。

Both Egypt and China mostly lacked an active posture towards their neighbours, and towards parts of the world farther away.

埃及早期依赖对外贸易获取一些主要商品，尤其是木材。但它是通过中间商来获取这些商品的，主要是在公元前三千年和两千年时期的腓尼基人，后来是希腊人。大约在公元前二千年末和公元前一千年初，埃及控制了巴勒斯坦和叙利亚，但正如我们所见，它并没有积极传播自己的语言（或文化）以在那里建立永久联系。它从未沿着地中海沿岸向西扩张：人口流动方向完全相反，而且昔兰尼城建于公元前630年左右，是希腊人而非埃及人建立的。埃及可能在南方更为活跃，试图永久吞并库什的大部分地区（及其金矿），并派遣一些探险队沿红海南下，与传说中的蓬特之地（可能位于索马里）进行贸易。尽管人们认为统一尼罗河泛滥、两侧被沙漠环绕的黑土地具有文化价值，但这些努力的最终效果微乎其微。这些环境恶劣地区的人口实在太少。在政治上，最引人注目的结果是八世纪末库什人对埃及的反向入侵——库什人崇尚埃及文化。

Egypt early relied on foreign trade for some of its staple goods, particularly timber. But it secured this through intermediaries, mainly Phoenicians in the third and second millennia, later Greeks. It had control of Palestine and Syria around the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the first, but as we have seen did not actively spread its language (or its culture) to build permanent links there. It never spread out along the Mediterranean coast to the west: population movement was all in the reverse direction, and the city of Cyrene, when it was established c.630 BC, was a Greek, not an Egyptian venture. It may have been more active southward, attempting to incorporate much of Kush (and its gold mines) permanently, and sending some of its own expeditions down the Red Sea to trade with the fabulous Land of Punt, perhaps in Somalia. Although there was seen to be cultural value in unifying the Black Lands, flooded by the Nile, and surrounded by desert wastes on either side, the net effect of these efforts was small. The populations in these harsh regions were just too scant. Politically, the most striking result was the reverse invasion of Egypt in the late eighth century—by Kushite enthusiasts for Egyptian culture.

中国与埃及的处境截然不同，这颇具讽刺意味。中国北部和西部边界几乎完全开放，需要进行防御；而南部边界则天然封闭，中国却积极进行开发和殖民活动。东部沿海地区更多地被视为另一道边界，这使得中国更容易遭受海盗袭击，而非提供海上扩张的机会。

China was in a very different position from Egypt, by an irony of fate having to defend an intrinsically open border in the north and west, but actively developing and colonising across a naturally occluded frontier in the south. The coasts to the east were seen more as another border, which left China open to pirate attack, rather than offering an opportunity for maritime expansion.

然而，在蛮族包围圈之外，人们普遍认为，更西边的印度、波斯帝国和罗马帝国，存在着值得更多尊重的异域文明。事实上，中国朝廷曾派遣一两位使节去探索并考察这些异域文明；佛教、琐罗亚斯德教、景教和伊斯兰教都在唐朝统治时期传入中国，以至于前三种宗教在845年遭到官方迫害（只有佛教和伊斯兰教幸存下来）。872年，中国皇帝义宗以其对犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教主要教义的了解，给来访的穆斯林伊本·瓦哈卜留下了深刻的印象。但中国与这些宗教发源地之间唯一的物质联系，是通过到访中国港口的外国商人。直到16世纪，这些商人都来自印度洋沿岸的经济体，即阿拉伯、波斯和印度。

But beyond the encircling zones of barbarians, there was a sense that farther to the west, in India and the Persian and Roman empires, there were foreigners worthy of considerably more respect. In fact the Chinese court sent one or two emissaries to discover and report on these exotic civilisations; and Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Islam all penetrated China under Tang rule, to the extent that the first three suffered official persecution in 845. (Only Buddhism and Islam survived it.) The Chinese emperor Yi Zong famously impressed the Muslim visitor Ibn Wahab in 872 with his knowledge of the principal facts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But the only material links with the countries that had produced them came through foreign traders visiting Chinese ports. Until the sixteenth century these were all from the Indian Ocean economies, Arabia, Persia and India.

印度的情况则有所不同。佛教传入中国（公元1世纪，经由印度人的推动）并开始扎根后，自公元4世纪末法显以来，许多中国僧人便开始前往印度，有时甚至不惜触犯法律。其中最著名的玄奘于公元627年被迫秘密启程，但最终于公元644年返回，受到唐太宗的正式欢迎。^*资助大型佛教文献翻译中心成为一种风尚。此外，中国僧人还多次远征印度，学习和收集文献——已知在10世纪之前共有56次，其中34次从广州（今广州）经海路前往，22次则穿越塔克拉玛干沙漠和兴都库什山脉。 ³³所有这些都堪称近代以前中国为与外部文明接触而开展的最大规模、最持久的行动。

The case of India was different. Once Buddhism had reached China (in the first century AD, through Indian initiative) and begun to establish itself, Chinese monks starting with Fa-Xian in the late fourth century were drawn to make the journey from China themselves, sometimes in stealthy disregard of the law. The most famous of them, Xuan-Zang, had to depart illegally and furtively in 627, but was able to return to an official welcome from the emperor Tai Zong in 644.^* It became fashionable to fund large-scale centres for translation of Buddhist literature. There was also a series of expeditions by Chinese monks to study and gather literature in India—fifty-six are known before the tenth century, of whom thirty-four travelled by sea from Guangzhou (Canton) and twenty-two overland past the Taklamakan desert and the Hindu Kush.³³ All this must represent the greatest sustained initiative that China undertook before the modern period to make contact with outside civilisations.

翻译过程中产生的数千个新词对汉语产生了深远的影响，这些新词通常以现有的简单汉语词汇为基础，但以新的方式组合。三个典型的例子是“过去”、“现在”和“将来”，它们都由两个部分组成：过去/去，出现/在那里，尚未/来。每个词都精确地反映了相应的巴利语词汇的隐喻：atīta、paccuppanna、anāgata。^†这些词汇成为汉语常用词汇的核心。

There was a lasting effect on Chinese from the many thousands of new terms which the translations produced, usually building on existing simple Chinese words but combining them in new ways. Three characteristic examples are guò-qu, ‘past’, xiàn-zài, ‘present’, and wèi-lái, ‘future’, each built of two elements: passing/go, appear/be-there, not-yet/come. Each precisely reflects the metaphor of a corresponding Pali word: atīta, paccuppanna, anāgata.^† Such words became central to active Chinese vocabulary.

这里存在一种讽刺意味，或者更确切地说，语法与政治之间存在着某种重要的关联。其他国家和语言可能只是借用了梵语或巴利语词汇的某种变形版本，并以此来补充自身的语言。这种情况在整个东南亚地区都存在，尽管东南亚的语言与印度语言的差异，正如汉语与印度语言的差异一样大。（参见第五章，第183页。）然而，新词是汉语对源自梵语或巴利语词汇的概念进行重构这一事实，与中国处理对外关系的总体策略是一致的：始终力图将对外关系控制在国内。

There is an irony here, or rather a significant correspondence between grammar and government. Other countries and languages may simply have borrowed some mangled version of the Sanskrit or Pali words, and supplemented the language that way. This is what was happening all over South-East Asia, even though its languages were just as different from the Indian languages as was Chinese. (See Chapter 5, p. 183.) But the fact that new words were reconstructions in Chinese of the concepts derived from Sanskrit or Pali words is of a piece with China’s general strategy in conducting its foreign relations: to attempt always to keep them under domestic control.

这种维持控制的尝试也体现在中国对其前后门户——绕过塔克拉玛干沙漠通往敦煌的“丝绸之路”以及东部沿海港口——的管理上。尽管自罗马时代起，中国就已做好保卫丝绸之路免受邻近蛮族侵扰的准备，但随着海上贸易的兴起，这条路线的重要性逐渐被掩盖。在明朝时期（约1368年起）的三个世纪里，海上贸易实际上禁止私人贸易，但即便允许，贸易也主要集中在广州（今广州港），福建泉州港（位于更北边）也允许一些贸易参与竞争。从1757年到1842年以及1949年到1979年，广州享有垄断地位，延续了中国政府对贸易的监控和宽松的税收政策。然而，在随后的一个世纪里，这种垄断地位被欧美势力强行打破。

This attempt to maintain control was also a feature of China’s management of its front and back doors, the ‘Silk Roads’ round the Taklamakan desert to Dunhuang and the ports along the eastern seaboard. Although China was prepared to defend the security of the Silk Roads against the neighbouring barbarians from Roman times onward, the importance of the route was gradually eclipsed by the growth of the maritime trade. The maritime route was actually closed to private trade during the three centuries of the Ming period from around 1368, but when allowed this trade was concentrated mostly at Guangzhou (Canton), with some competition allowed from the more northerly port of Quanzhou in Fujian. From 1757 to 1842 and 1949 to 1979, Guangzhou enjoyed a monopoly, continuing the Chinese government preference for monitoring and easy taxation. This was forcibly broken open by European and American interests in the intervening century.

中国的一般政策是允许对外贸易，但不主动发起贸易或寻求与外国势力进行外交接触，但郑和却是一个奇怪的例外。郑和在 1405 年至 1433 年间进行了七次伟大的印度洋航行，到达了红海和摩加迪沙。

A strange exception to the general policy of the Chinese—which was to admit foreign trade on terms, but not to initiate it or to seek diplomatic contact with foreign powers—comes in the apparently unique case of Admiral Zheng-He, who undertook seven great voyages round the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433, reaching the Red Sea and Mogadishu.

在印度次大陆，郑和的注意力主要集中在斯里兰卡。据记载，他在 1411 年的第二次斯里兰卡之旅中，在一块事先在中国准备好的石碑上留下了中文、泰米尔语和波斯语的三语铭文。

In the Indian subcontinent Zheng-He’s attention was mostly concentrated on Śri Lanka, where on his second voyage in 1411 he is known to have left a trilingual inscription on a stone tablet (prepared in advance in China) in Chinese, Tamil and Persian.

它传达了中国明朝皇帝的问候，并用三种语言分别表达了对佛陀、天神提那瓦莱-尼那瓦尔和真主的敬意，列举了大量的金银丝绸等供品。这些访问显然并非简单的礼节性拜访，与欧洲人在海外的臭名昭著的行为有着某种惊人的相似之处：面对抵抗，中国人绑架了斯里兰卡国王，强行将其带到南京皇帝面前，但随后又将他连同岛上最神圣的遗物——佛牙舍利——一起归还给了皇帝。这导致中国宣称对斯里兰卡拥有主权，而斯里兰卡人也一直通过缴纳贡赋来承认这一主权，直到1459年。

It conveys greetings from the Chinese Ming emperor, and in its three languages expresses respect to the Buddha, the god Tenavarai-Nenavar and Allah respectively, listing massive offerings in gold, silver, silk, etc. These expeditions were evidently not mere courtesy visits, and have a certain dramatic similarity to the notorious behaviour of Europeans abroad: faced with resistance, the Chinese abducted the Śri Lankan king and took him forcibly to the emperor in Nanjing, but then returned him, along with the most holy relic in the island, the Sacred Tooth of Buddha. This resulted in a Chinese claim of sovereignty over Śri Lanka, which was actually respected through payment of tribute by the Śri Lankans until 1459.

尽管这些帝国主义行径表面上取得了成功，但在郑和最后一次下西洋之后却戛然而止，再也没有重启。个中缘由，至今无人知晓。中国的对外政策也回归了其一贯的内向型和防御型立场。

Despite their apparent success, such imperialist initiatives ceased abruptly after Zheng-He’s final voyage, and were never renewed. No one really knows why. China’s foreign policy returned to its characteristic inward-looking and defensive stance.

然而，正如上文（《南海之外》，第146页）所述，中国侨民为中国及其人民在东南亚开辟了一条桥头堡，而这正是中国政府从未寻求过，甚至在过去几个世纪里一直加以阻挠的。如今，在东南亚所有主要国家，华人社区已成为投资资本的主要来源。

Nevertheless, as seen above (’Beyond the southern sea’, p. 146), Chinese expatriates have given China, and the Chinese, a bridgehead into South-East Asia which its government never looked for—and indeed discouraged over many centuries. Now, in all the major countries of South-East Asia, Chinese-language communities are the principal source of investment capital.

在菲律宾，海外华人占该国人口的1%，却控制着超过一半的股市。在印度尼西亚，这两个比例分别为4%和75%；在马来西亚，分别为32%和60%。在泰国，海外华人至少拥有该国一半的财富……据估计，5100万海外华人掌控着价值7000亿美元的经济——与12亿中国大陆人口的经济规模大致相当。 ³⁴

In the Philippines, the overseas Chinese make up 1% of the country’s population, but control over half of the stock market. In Indonesia the proportions are 4% and 75% respectively, in Malaysia 32% and 60%. In Thailand the overseas Chinese account for at least half of the wealth … According to one estimate, the 51 million overseas Chinese control an economy worth $700 billion—roughly the same size as the 1.2 billion mainlanders.³⁴

随着以华人为主的企业不断发展壮大，它们将有机会用中文（无论是普通话还是闽南语）进行交流；因此，中文首次拥有了向大陆以外地区扩展的潜力。中国不再与选择在海外谋生的同胞保持距离，这种新的、更具外交手腕的中国形象有可能变得公开具有影响力，甚至可能占据主导地位。

Growing Chinese-dominated businesses will have the opportunity of communicating with one another in Chinese, whether Mandarin or Southern Min; and so for the first time the Chinese language has potential for expansion outside the mainland. China itself is no longer keeping its distance from its fellow-Chinese who have chosen to make their living abroad, and it is possible that this new, more diplomatic face of China will become openly influential, perhaps even hegemonic.

中国的门徒

China’s disciples

尽管中国一向对外国影响持谨慎态度，但其周边一些发展出一定程度文明和独立国家的邻国，在接受中国的影响时却远没有那么小心翼翼。朝鲜、日本和越南等国及其人民都采取了这种态度。它们各自使用的语言都与汉语无关。它们都曾遭受过中国零星的征服（尽管日本仅在蒙古帝国主义扩张初期遭受过这种征服）。但它们最初学习读写的并非本国语言，而是文言文。它们也都通过改造或补充汉字的使用，发展出了各自语言的书写系统。

Although China was always reserved in accepting any influence from foreigners, its smaller neighbours who achieved some level of settled civilisation and independent statehood were nothing like so circumspect in their acceptance of influence from China. The states and peoples of Korea, Japan and Vietnam adopted this position. Each of them spoke a language unrelated to Chinese. Each of them had to resist sporadic Chinese attempts at conquest (though Japan suffered this only in the first flush of Mongol imperialism). But each first learnt to read and write not in their own languages but in classical Chinese. And each developed writing systems for their own languages by transforming or supplementing the use of Chinese characters.

与汉语吸收梵语和巴利语不同，这些语言都直接吸收了汉语词汇，即便这些词汇与自身语言的语音系统并不完全契合。毕竟，对他们而言，中国是先进文明的源泉。^*因此，他们的语言中充满了汉语借词，并根据自身的发音进行了调整，这种情况一直延续至今。他们很快就对借用的音节及其对应的汉字的含义有了和中国人一样清晰的理解——事实上，或许理解得更透彻，因为他们也使用相同的汉字来表示自己语言中的词语，这些词语之间仅意义相关。

Unlike Chinese with Sanskrit and Pali, they each adopted vocabulary from Chinese as it was, regardless of the fact that it did not fit well within the sound systems of their own languages. For them, after all, China represented the fountainhead of advanced civilisation.^* As a result their languages became full of Chinese loan vocabulary, modified for their own pronunciation, and have remained so ever since. They soon had as clear an appreciation of the meanings of the syllables they borrowed, and the characters associated with them, as the Chinese had themselves—indeed, perhaps clearer, since they also used the same characters to represent words in their own languages, related only by meaning.

这种对汉语的忠实吸收和融合，为现代汉语历史比较研究提供了一个有用的“时间胶囊”。这三种“汉字方言”——汉韩语、汉日语和汉越语——都由借自汉语的音节和词汇构成。它们如此完整，以至于可以用它们来朗读完整的汉语文本。因此，它们保留了汉语词汇借用时的发音。事实上，就日语而言——一如既往地复杂——根据词汇借用的时间（公元六世纪、八世纪或公元二世纪初），存在三种不同的发音： go-on、kan-on和tō-on 。例如，汉语中的“内”（ nèi ，意为“里面”），现在写作noi，在越南语中发音为第六声，在韩语中发音为nae ，在日语中发音为dai或nai。这些古老的音标在1954年瑞典学者伯恩哈德·卡尔格伦（Bernhard Karlgren）重建七世纪汉语发音时发挥了至关重要的作用^。35

This faithful adoption and incorporation of Chinese language has provided a useful time capsule of a kind for modern comparative research on the history of Chinese. These three ‘Sinoxenic’ dialects, Sino-Korean, Sino-Japanese, Sino-Vietnamese, are made up of syllables and words borrowed from Chinese. They are so complete that it is possible to use them to read out whole texts in wényán. As such, they have preserved an echo of Chinese as it was pronounced when the words were borrowed. In fact, in the case of Japanese—complex as ever—there are three distinct echoes: go-on, kan-on and tō-on, depending on whether the word was borrowed in the sixth century, the eighth century or early in the second millennium. So the Mandarin word nèi, ‘within’, written , is now noi, pronounced in the sixth tone in Vietnamese, nae in Korean and dai or nai in Japanese. These antiquated styles proved vital when in 1954 the Swedish scholar Bernhard Karlgren came up with a reconstruction of the sounds of seventh-century Chinese.³⁵

这种对邻国文化的积极吸收，可以被视为汉语的一次重要的二次传播。人们常常将其比作拉丁语在英语和其他现代欧洲语言中的作用，或是阿拉伯语在波斯语和土耳其语中的作用，但实际上，它更像是苏美尔语在阿卡德语中的基础性作用。汉语与其吸收的语言之间并无直接关联，结构上也截然不同。然而，汉语的文字系统却成为了这些语言识字的基础，其词汇在任何形式的文明对话中都不可或缺，其文学作品也成为了这些语言自身教育体系的基石。

This avid cultural discipleship of its neighbours could be considered a major secondary spread of the Chinese language. It is often compared to the role of Latin within English and other modern European languages, or Arabic within Persian and Turkish, but it is really more comparable with the fundamental role of Sumerian within Akkadian. Chinese was a language quite unrelated to its disciple languages, and totally unlike them structurally. Nevertheless, its writing system became the root of their literacy, its words became inescapable for any sort of educated discourse, and its literature was adopted as the foundation for their own education system.

邻国对他们如此敬畏，中国人很难不将自己的优越性视为普遍的、客观的事实。

With their neighbours so in awe of them, it must have been hard for the Chinese to see their superiority as anything but a universal, objective fact.

应对入侵：埃及的削弱

Coping with invasions: Egyptian undercut

来自沙漠的异族遍布各地……事实上，沙漠已遍布大地。耕地被毁。外来的蛮族入侵了埃及……到处都已不见人烟……

Foreigners from the desert have become people every where … Indeed, the desert is spread throughout the land. The cultivated districts are destroyed. Barbarians from outside have come to Egypt … There are really no people anywhere …

伊普韦尔的训诫，第i.5行，第iii.1行及以下。（埃及，公元前三千年晚期）³⁶

Admonitions of Ipuwer, lines i.5,iii.lff. (Egyptian, late third millennium BC)³⁶

这段文字出自对埃及社会的悲观分析，后来成为文学经典。（现存的唯一一份手稿是在文本成书约一千年后抄写的。）它表明，早在有文字记载的历史早期，保守派人士就哀叹蛮族涌入埃及，他们认为这扰乱了社会秩序：“农奴成了主人……曾经对着水面自拍的女子，如今拥有了一面镜子……”文中“蛮族”一词是pīdjeti，意为“弓箭手”，他们把沙漠的气息（hrswt）带回了家，这与真正的埃及人——正统的埃及人——形成了鲜明的对比。

This is from a pessimistic analysis of Egyptian society, which became a literary classic. (The one surviving manuscript was copied out some thousand years after the text was written.) It shows that even early in its recorded history conservatives were bewailing barbarian influxes into Egypt, which as they saw it disrupted the social order: ‘Serfs have become owners … She who looked at her face in the water is now the owner of a mirror …’ The word for barbarian is pīdjeti, ‘bowman’, bringing his desert home (hrswt) with him, and pointedly contrasted with real people, proper Egyptians.

这段文字的年代早于我们所知的任何外国入侵埃及的事件，但显然，移民，尤其是那些社会地位显赫的移民，早已成为一种固定的形象。然而，这种古埃及的封闭性更多地反映了其根深蒂固的态度，而非任何爱国者面临的实际危机：埃及语的延续表明，埃及在随后两千年间吸收了所有外来移民，却没有丧失其核心特性和传统。

This text pre-dates any foreign incursions into Egypt that we know about, but evidently the immigrant, particularly unwelcome if he was a social success, was already a stock figure. Yet this ancient Egyptian insularity is telling us more about perennial attitudes than any actual crisis for patriots: the persistence of the Egyptian language shows that the country was able to absorb all the foreign immigration of the following two millennia without losing its central character and traditions.

埃及历史上一个有趣的特点是，在穆斯林到来之前，他们没有遭受过像阿摩利人和阿拉米人入侵美索不达米亚那样大规模的游牧民族入侵。然而，我们知道利比亚移民在几个世纪里都相当频繁，而且在埃及的各个王朝中，至少喜克索斯国王和库什人都是通过武力夺取政权的外来者。那么，为什么这些入侵对埃及的语言和文化影响如此之小呢？部分原因必然在于当时埃及人口密度极高（与伊普韦尔的观点相反）：他们人数众多，又受益于尼罗河的丰饶物产，因此外来者注定会融入其中。

It is an interesting feature of Egyptian history that, until the advent of the Muslims, they suffered no overwhelming nomadic invasions comparable to the coming of the Amorites and Aramaeans to Mesopotamia. Yet we know that Libyan immigration was significant over many centuries, and among Egyptian dynasties at least the Hyksos kings and the Kushites were foreigners who installed themselves by force. Why, then, so little effect on Egypt’s language and culture? Part of the reason must have been the high density of the Egyptians on the ground (pace Ipuwer): there were so many of them, benefiting from the bounty of the Nile, that interlopers were doomed to merge.

因此，尽管经历了入侵，王朝传统也出现了分裂和断裂，埃及仍然忠于自己的宗教，以及法老通过 maR 'at 进行统治的概念。

And so despite the incursions, and the splits and discontinuities in the dynastic tradition, Egypt remained true to its religion, and the concept of a pharaoh ruling through maR ‘at.

但入侵最终还是摧毁了埃及语在其发源地的地位：毕竟，如今的埃及是一个以穆斯林为主、基督教少数群体为主的国家，所有人都讲阿拉伯语。埃及语最终是如何失去对其使用者的控制的呢？

But invasions ultimately did undo the Egyptian language in its homeland: after all, Egypt is today a predominantly Muslim country with a Christian minority, everyone speaking Arabic. How did Egyptian finally come to lose its grip on its speakers?

首先，埃及人口中讲埃及语的部分必然经历了逐渐衰落和稀释的过程。埃及逐渐成为一个高度多语言的社会。毕竟，在埃及独立存在的最后五百年里，它遭受了亚述人、波斯人、希腊人和罗马人的多次入侵。在希腊化时期（公元前332-30年），还有大量犹太人涌入，他们的主要通用语是希腊语。这些外来语言都没有在埃及发展成为一种完全的通用语。但正如我们所见，与亚述人和波斯人相关的阿拉姆语确实在埃及社会中传播开来，超越了官方范畴。而且，每一个后来的统治者都带来了新的社群，这些社群使用的语言并非埃及语。

First of all, there must have been a progressive weakening and dilution of the Egyptian-speaking part of the population. It gradually became a highly multilingual society. Egypt, after all, underwent many invasions in its last five hundred years of independent existence, at the hands of Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans. In the Hellenistic period (332-30 BC) there was also a major influx of Jews, whose major lingua franca was Greek. None of these brought a language that was to achieve full vernacular status in Egypt. But as we have seen, the Aramaic associated with the Assyrians and the Persians did spread within Egyptian society beyond the official sphere, and each of these succeeding powers brought in and fostered new communities that would have spoken something other than Egyptian.

然而，当阿拉伯人在公元 7 世纪中叶伊斯兰教兴起之初占领埃及时，埃及语仍然是当时埃及街头和田野里使用的主要语言。

Nevertheless, when Arabs in the first flush of Islam took possession of the country in the mid-seventh century AD, Egyptian was still the principal language spoken in its streets and fields.

阿拉伯人并非第一个入侵埃及的游牧民族：利比亚人，或许还有喜克索斯人，早在公元前第二个千年就已做到了这一点。在埃及历史上记载不全的三个中间时期，可能还发生过许多其他规模较小的入侵。阿拉伯人也不是第一个使用外语进行统治的政权：波斯人、希腊人和罗马人都曾这样做过。阿拉伯人也不是第一个拥有海外中心并占领埃及，将其作为殖民地统治的强大政权：波斯人曾统治埃及长达两个世纪，罗马人也曾统治埃及长达七个世纪。阿拉伯人甚至也不是第一个引入新宗教的民族：基督教在罗马时期就成功地做到了这一点。

The Arabs were not the first force of nomads to penetrate Egypt: the Libyans, and perhaps the Hyksos, had achieved this long before in the second millennium, and there may have been many other smaller incursions over the three poorly documented Intermediate Periods of Egyptian history. The Arabs were not the first power to use a foreign language for purposes of government: all of the Persians, Greeks and Romans had done this. The Arabs were not the first substantial power with a centre abroad to take possession of Egypt, and rule it as a colony: this had been done before for two centuries by the Persians, and for seven centuries by the Romans. The Arabs were not even the first to introduce a new religion: this had been successfully attempted by the Christians in the Roman period.

那么，为什么阿拉伯语是第一个在其发源地成功取代埃及语的语言呢？答案必然在于所有这些因素的综合作用。埃及语的优势被逐一瓦解。

Why, then, was Arabic the first language successfully to replace Egyptian in its home country? The answer must lie in the combination of all these circumstances. Egyptian’s strengths were subverted one by one.

首先，亚述和巴比伦在巴勒斯坦的战争在尼罗河三角洲地区形成了一个庞大的阿拉姆语移民群体。这本应终结埃及在该国的语言垄断地位，但这本身意义不大。然而，随后，许多精于经商的希腊人涌入埃及，他们受赛伊特王朝的邀请，以巩固其对抗近东列强的联盟，并在三角洲的瑙克拉提斯设立了专门的希腊语贸易站。埃及从此成为一个多语言社会，外来语言越来越与更高的社会地位联系在一起。波斯征服埃及，以及随后波斯和（亚历山大之后）希腊等一系列外国统治者的统治，意味着埃及的高级行政管理开始使用一种对埃及而言非英语的语言：阿拉姆语使用了两百年，之后希腊语又使用了一千年^。

First the Assyrian and Babylonian wars in Palestine created a large Aramaic-speaking émigré community in the Delta area. This would have been the end of Egyptian’s language monopoly in the country, not very significant in itself. But then the country was penetrated by numerous business-minded Greeks, brought in by the Saite dynasty to buttress an alliance against Near Eastern powers, and granted their own, Greek-speaking, entrepôt in Naucratis in the Delta. Egypt was now very much a multilingual society, with foreigners’ languages more and more associated with higher prestige. The Persian conquest, and a succession of foreign rulers from Persia and then (after Alexander) Greece, meant that now higher-level administration began to be conducted in a language foreign to Egypt: in Aramaic for two hundred years, and then in Greek for a millennium.^*

从语言学角度来看，公元前30年罗马人推翻希腊统治后，除了少量拉丁语使用者（主要是士兵）涌入埃及之外，并没有发生太大变化。但这次政权更迭却成为了埃及语言命运的最深刻转折点：埃及不再由自己的国王为自身利益而统治，而是由行省总督统治，成为罗马的粮仓，并（日益）成为富裕游客的旅游胜地。

Linguistically, not much would have changed when the Romans unseated the Greeks in 30 BC, other than a small influx of Latin speakers, principally soldiers. But this change of government was to prove the profoundest turning point for the fate of the language: Egypt was no longer to be governed by its own kings in its own interest, but by provincial governors as a useful bread basket for Rome, and (increasingly) a destination for rich tourists.

所有这些入侵的共同之处在于，它们并非游牧迁徙，而是由组织严密的军队为实现指挥官的全球政治目标而进行的军事行动。控制埃及的目的是为了重现其昔日的辉煌，并攫取其现有的农业财富。除此之外，埃及必须保持其传统，因此，人口流动仅限于精英阶层和少数群体，例如犹太人。然而，埃及文明已沦为一场空洞的表演。除非罗马皇帝恰巧到访，否则已不再有法老通过“玛拉特”（maR'at）统治国家并主持祭祀仪式；到了公元三世纪，就连这种伪装也被抛弃了。

What all the invasions had in common was the fact that they were not nomadic movements: they were military affairs conducted by well-organised armies in pursuit of commanders’ global political aims. The point in controlling Egypt was to be associated with its ancient glory, and to appropriate its present agricultural wealth. Otherwise, Egypt was to be kept true to its traditions, and so the only population movements were movements of elites, and small groups such as the Jews. Egyptian civilisation had, however, become a hollow show. There was no longer any pharaoh to hold the country through maR ‘at and perform the sacrifices, unless the Roman emperor happened to be visiting, and by the third century AD even this pretence had been abandoned.

埃及人保留的唯一一项精英活动是宗教，而语言则成为神职人员与普通民众之间的纽带。然而，经过三个世纪的罗马统治，就连这种纽带也开始衰弱。当地的基督教社群不断发展壮大，先是在罗马的迫害下，后又在官方的支持下，他们以埃及语而非希腊语作为官方语言。这样一来，基督教为埃及人的忠诚提供了一个新的精神寄托。但其日益壮大的势力也伴随着不宽容，尤其针对古老的宗教。基督徒们又怎会想到，他们摧毁宗教的同时，也正在斩断支撑他们独特身份的最深根基呢？到了公元四世纪，埃及已成为一个基督教国家，民众说着埃及语，但行政和文化生活却以希腊语进行。埃及人唯一的精英活动仍然是宗教，但如今这已是本土化的基督教信仰。

The one elite activity retained by Egyptians was religion, and the language provided a link between its priests and the common people. Nevertheless, after three centuries of Roman rule even this link was to weaken. The local Christian community had grown, first in the face of Roman persecution, and then with official support, adopting Egyptian rather than Greek as its language. In this way, it provided a new focus, of a spiritual kind, for Egyptian loyalty. But its growing strength was characteristically marked with intolerance, particularly towards the ancient religion. How were the Christians to know that in destroying it, they were also pruning away the deepest roots that anchored and sustained their separate identity? By the fourth century AD, Egypt had become a Christian country whose populace spoke Egyptian, but whose administration and cultural life were conducted in Greek. It was still true that Egyptian’s one elite activity was religion, but now this was the local version of the Christian faith.

公元641年，当政治权力转移到阿拉伯语使用者手中时，希腊语精英阶层的活动便无处容身。尽管希腊语的正式使用持续了一个多世纪，但这些活动很快便销声匿迹。宗教的衰落则要缓慢得多。但这并非仅仅是又一次政治征服：与亚历山大和奥古斯都·凯撒不同，伊斯兰教的目标是征服所有人。当它最终实现这一目标时，保留埃及语的最后一个理由也随之消失：皈依者融入了一个新的宗教社群，一个以阿拉伯语为母语、具有国际视野的社群。埃及语则成为那些决心坚守基督教信仰的人的礼拜语言，而这些人也逐渐成为少数群体。

In 641, when political control moved to Arabic speakers, there was no space left for the elite activities in Greek. They soon withered, although some formal use of Greek continued for over a century. Religion was to yield much more slowly. But this was not just another political conquest: Islam, unlike Alexander and Augustus Caesar, aspired to win over all. When it did, the last motive for retaining Egyptian was removed: converts moved into a new confessional community, Arabic-speaking and cosmopolitan. Egyptian was left as the language of liturgy for those who were determined to hang on to their Christian faith, a gradually shrinking minority.

即使事后看来，也很难说基督教对埃及人来说究竟是福是祸。在罗马世俗统治下，它为埃及语社群提供了一个重要的宗教仪式中心；但它也激进地切断了埃及语与其民族异教历史的联系。它提供了一种新的、综合性的身份认同——“埃及基督徒”或“科普特人”，以取代古老的身份认同，这种身份认同持续了数个世纪，甚至在少数人中延续至今。然而，一个独立的埃及基督教派别，被宣传为普世信仰，其神学动机却几乎为零。因此，当埃及语社群面临阿拉伯语社群的挑战时，埃及语社群的力量也相应减弱：当埃及的诸神和仪式早已被遗忘时，他们又该如何维系自身的埃及身份认同呢？

Even in hindsight, it is difficult to say whether Christianity was more of a blessing or a bane to Egyptian. It provided a strong ritual focus for the Egyptian-speaking community under Roman secular rule; but it was militant in cutting the links the language had had with its national pagan past. It provided a new synthetic identity, that of ‘Egyptian Christian’ or Copt, to replace the ancient one, an identity that was to last for many centuries, and for a small minority even until the present day. But the theological motivation for a separate Egyptian sect of Christianity, promoted as a universal faith, was nil. Egyptian was correspondingly weaker when it faced the challenging embrace of the Arabic-speaking community: what ground was there to maintain their Egyptian identity when the gods and rituals of the land of Egypt had all been long forgotten?

最终，当埃及语不再是其唯一环境——埃及这片土地上的主流语言时，它便无法维系自身的存在。这种语言，如同法老时代的宗教一样，曾是埃及身份认同的象征。只要埃及的宗教根植于埃及本土，埃及语便能在政府使用外语的情况下生存下去。然而，它无法在外国政府和真正意义上的国际化宗教的双重统治下生存，因为其使用者已失去了任何民族认同的根基。他们或许会像其他人一样，最终沦为阿拉伯穆斯林。

Ultimately, Egyptian could not sustain itself when it ceased to be a majority language in its one and only environment, the land of Egypt. The language, like the pharaonic religion, had been a symbol of Egyptian identity. Egyptian could survive a government speaking a foreign language, as long as its religion was based in Egypt. It could not survive a foreign government and a truly cosmopolitan religion, for its speakers had nothing national left as a focus for their identity. They might as well become Arab Muslims, just like all the rest.

应对入侵：中国人不安

Coping with invasions: Chinese unsettled

公认的中国边境管理战略³⁷

Recognised Chinese strategies for border management³⁷

埃及的最终衰落可以理解为失去自身中心意识的长期后果。

The final decline of Egyptian can be understood as the long-term effect of losing the sense of its own centre.

罗马征服之后，埃及充其量只是罗马地中海世界边缘一个令人好奇的存在，它不再掌握自己的命运，只能满怀希望地向西眺望。四个世纪后，罗马的重心转移到拜占庭，对埃及的影响微乎其微；埃及的身份认同主要依靠其对新兴基督教信仰的贡献得以维系。又过了三个世纪，埃及再次遭受重创，被并入一个截然不同的异族帝国——这个帝国的中心如今位于其东部（先是大马士革，后是巴格达）——这彻底压垮了埃及的独立性。埃及从此走向衰落，这也是它最后一次陷入衰落。

After the Roman conquest, Egypt was at best a curiosity on the edge of Rome’s Mediterranean world, no longer responsible for its own destiny, but looking hopefully to the west. Four centuries later, the change of focus from Rome to Byzantium had had little impact; Egypt’s identity was sustained by its contributions to the new and growing faith of Christianity. Three centuries later still, the further shock of being incorporated into a quite different alien empire, one that was centred now to its east (in Damascus, then Baghdad), was more than its separate identity could stand. For the first and last time, Egyptian went into decline.

中国一直视自己为世界的中心，传统上称之为“天下”，四周被文明程度和道德水平较低的民族所环绕。现代对中国的称呼“中央”似乎已经道尽了一切。但另一种指代整个国家的方式是“四海之内”，这种说法至少可以追溯到孔子时代。中国人传统上认为自己生活在四海之内的九大洲。这四海分别被视为蛮夷的领地，即所谓的“四夷”：东夷北狄西荣南蛮。将环绕中国腹地的草原视为海洋，这种观念对于任何看过现代地图的人来说都显得匪夷所思，但在草原上居住着游牧民族的年代，这种观念却具有一定的现实意义。这些游牧民族在广袤的草原上游荡，掠夺居住在绿洲（即这片海洋中的岛屿）周围的定居农民。在传统的世界观中，四坳之外是八荒，因此，古代中国人很少有兴趣探索更远的地方也就不足为奇了^。

China has always viewed itself as being at the centre of its world, traditionally Tiān Xià, ‘Heaven Below’, encompassed on every side by lesser peoples, inferior in cultivation and morals. The modern word for the country, Zhōnggŭo, ’Central Realm’, seems to say it all. But another way of referring to the whole country is Sìnši zhīněi, ‘Within the Four Seas’, going back at least to Confucius. The Chinese conventionally saw themselves as living in Nine Continents within Four Seas. Each of those seas was seen as the haunt of a barbarian people, the so-called Sìyí, ‘The Four Yi’: Dōng Yí Běi Dí Xī Róng Nán Mán, ‘east the Yi, north the Di, west the Rong, south the Man’. This idea of the steppes that surround China’s heartland as seas, bizarre to anyone who looks at a modern map, had a certain reality when those steppes were populated by pastoral nomads, roaming the grassy plains to prey on the sedentary farmers who lived round the oases, the islands in this ocean. And beyond the Sìyí in the traditional world-view lay the Bāhuāng, ‘the Eight Wastes’, so it is understandable that the traditional Chinese was little tempted to explore farther abroad.^*

在这群敌对势力中，中国人认为自己处于中心，他们拥有共同的文明价值观，并始终渴望将愿意加入他们阵营的邻国纳入自己的怀抱。

Within this ring of hostiles, the Chinese saw themselves at its centre, with a shared conception of civilised values, and a persistent aspiration to bring willing neighbours into their fold.

中国社会有三个特点，使其庞大的社群不仅保持中心，而且在社会和语言上也保持团结。首先，这是他们所处环境的固有特征，与他们的居住地息息相关。其次，是中国人独创的一种制度，这种制度具有极强的持久性。第三，则是蛮族入侵带来的意想不到的结果。

There were three features of the Chinese situation that kept their vast community not only centred but also united, socially and linguistically. The first was a fact about their human environment, which quite literally came with the territory that they inhabited. The second was an institution invented quite distinctively by the Chinese, which turned out to be remarkably persistent. And the third was the paradoxical result of the barbarian conquests when they came.

事实是，敌对的游牧民族周期性地涌入，他们说着与汉语截然不同的语言，劫掠定居的中国农民。这既对语言产生了客观影响，也对中国人的意识产生了主观影响。从语言学角度来看，这些周期性的入侵使北方人口不断迁徙，阻碍了他们形成各自独立的方言区。但即便在汉唐鼎盛时期，蛮族威胁被有效抵御了数个世纪之久，蛮族入侵的意识依然存在，这自然而然地增强了民众的团结意识。外敌入侵的威胁使中国人时刻关注着自身可能失去的东西；而中央防线屡次出现部分失效，使得中国北方持续处于动荡之中，这种反常的现象反而维系了其口语的凝聚力。

The fact was the periodic influx of hostile marauding nomads, speaking languages radically different to Chinese, and preying on settled Chinese farmers. This had an objective effect on the language, and a subjective effect on Chinese consciousness. Linguistically, the periodic influxes kept the northern Chinese population on the move, preventing it from settling into distinct dialect areas. But even when, as in the golden ages of the Han and the Tang, the barbarian threat was effecively countered for centuries at a time, the consciousness of barbarians at the gate still remained, naturally causing a greater sense of unity in the population. The external threat of invasion kept the Chinese focused on what they had to lose; and recurrent partial failures of the centre’s defences against it kept the north of China in flux, and so perversely maintained the cohesion of its spoken language.

这一制度指的是延续了十三个世纪的科举制度，考试成功是进入政府任职的关键。这意味着中国很早就拥有了正式的文官体系。当这一体系运作良好时，它对社会秩序的影响类似于外来入侵对语言秩序的影响。两者都倾向于削弱地方群体，并强调对更高层级的忠诚。精英化的文官制度培养了民众对国家的忠诚，削弱了个人忠诚。当中央政府衰弱时，个人忠诚往往会滋生，并将国家分裂成各路军阀的势力范围。但它还有另一个与汉语密切相关的影响。

The institution was the system of public examinations, persistent over thirteen centuries, where success was the key to a career in government. This meant that from a very early era China could boast a formally constituted civil service. When it was working, this had an effect on social order analogous to the influxes of invaders on the linguistic order. Both tended to reduce local groupings, and emphasise higher-level loyalties. The meritocratic civil service built loyalties to the state, and undercut the personal loyalties which, when the central government was weakening, tended to develop and split the country into the power bases of contending warlords. But it also had a further effect, bound up with the Chinese language.

课程几乎完全是文学性的，包括古典诗歌的创作（八世纪末武则天时期引入）以及著名的“八段文”的写作。 “八段文”要求学生清晰地表达古典文本中的思想，并将其应用于当代问题。因此，它只能促进以文言（即古典汉语）为主要教学语言的国家标准。

The syllabus was almost entirely literary, including composition of classical poetry (introduced under the empress Wu at the end of the eighth century) and of the notorious bāgŭwén, ‘eight-legged essays’, which rigorously elicited clear expression of the ideas from the classical texts and their application to contemporary problems. As such, it could only promote national standards for the major language in which it was conducted, wényán, classical Chinese.

从这个意义上讲，可以说，除皇室宫廷之外的中国国家，是中国文人精英的政治体现。蔡湘本人就是这一体制的杰出产物，他在十一世纪中叶对此提出了否定性的评论：

In this sense it is fair to say that the Chinese state, outside the imperial court, was constituted as the political manifestation of the Chinese literary elite. Cai Xiang, himself a brilliant product of the system, remarked negatively in the middle of the eleventh century:

如今在人事任命上，人们可以发现，他们的晋升主要取决于其文学素养。最高官员是文人；侍奉君主是文人；掌管财政事务的是文人；边防总司令是文人；所有地区交通专员是文人；所有省长都是文人^。38

Nowadays in appointing people it can be observed that they are advanced in office mainly on the basis of their literary skills. The highest office-holders are literary men; those attending the throne are literary men; those managing fiscal matters are literary men; the chief commanders of the border defences are literary men; all the Regional Transport Commissioners are literary men; all the Prefects in the provinces are literary men.³⁸

科举制度的论述中充满了对其精英主义理论与贵族和富豪统治的现实之间差距的警示。对于一个延续了两千多年、几经更迭的制度而言，这种情况几乎是必然的。然而，尽管它常常令众多才华横溢却未能得到赏识的人感到不满（例如，所有女性都被排除在外），但它从未真正消亡：它始终存在，是一种可以复兴或改革的潜在手段，能够将新的人才推上权力巅峰，成为中国政界内部一股不可或缺的变革力量，如同政府牡蛎壳中永恒的沙粒。

Accounts of the examination system are full of caveats about the distance between its meritocratic theory and its aristocratic and plutocratic reality. It could hardly have been otherwise in an institution that lasted for over two thousand years, every so often dropped or reconstituted. Nevertheless, however unsatisfactory it may often have been for the vast number of bright individuals whom it failed to favour (all women, for example, were excluded), it was never a dead letter: it always existed as a potential means which could be resurrected or reformed to bring new talent into power and influence, a built-in agitator of the sediments of the Chinese establishment, a perpetual grain of sand in the government oyster.

正如阿尔泰部落的入侵使中国北方民众始终处于动荡不安的状态一样，科举制度及其所建立的官职也使权力结构保持开放。因此，它促进了整个政治体的凝聚力，使人们能够使用共同的语言，而科举考试大纲则明确规定了这种语言的标准。

Just as invasion by Altaic hordes kept northern China’s populace on the boil, so the examination system, and appointments based on it, kept the power structures open. It therefore promoted the cohesion of the body politic as a whole, with a common language whose standards were clearly defined by the examination syllabus.

矛盾的结果是，尽管中国最终未能抵挡住来自军事化游牧民族的压力，不得不将王位拱手让给蒙古人和满族人，但中国依然保持着其独特的文化。与蛮族的斗争最终以失败告终——但这对汉语及其所承载的文化的未来而言无关紧要。从某种意义上说，汉语证明了它能够超越最根本的失败。

The paradoxical result was the fact that although China was ultimately unable to stem the pressure from militarised pastoral nomads, and had to yield its throne to the Mongols and the Manchus, China remained Chinese. The struggle with the barbarians was, in the last analysis, lost—yet it did not matter for the future of the language, or of the culture that it conveyed. In a way, Chinese showed that it could transcend the most fundamental defeat.

从战略角度来看，用中国式的术语来说，这可以概括为：

Strategically, this may be characterised—in Chinese terms—as:

— tōu liáng huàn zhù

—tōu liáng huàn zhù

偷走横梁，换掉立柱^。39

Steal the beams, change the pillars.³⁹

这句出自中国《三十六计》的格言指的是一种策略，即逐步使对手产生一种虚假的自信，使其误以为自己所依赖的体系依然稳固，而实际上这些体系已被削弱或收买。显然，要做到这一点，战略家必须与敌方组织保持密切联系，而这在遭受看似彻底的失败并接受投降之后很可能实现。以蒙古人为例——顺便一提，他们从未认真接受科举制度，因此很容易受到地方诸侯势力扩张的影响——事实证明，在一个世纪之内，他们就有可能建立起足够的区域权力基础，从而推翻中央政府。满族的情况则更为复杂，因为他们自身也意识到人口稀少，并有效地利用科举等中国制度来招募忠诚的干部。他们还将重心放在军事上。尽管如此，由于他们只占总人口的2%左右，他们最终还是无法与中国人共存而不被其同化。尽管法律禁止他们与汉人通婚或接受汉族习俗，也强制他们接受满语教育，而满语在政府文件中一直沿用至1911年清朝灭亡，但这些都无济于事。然而，在他们成功征服中国后的150年内，所有满族人都开始说汉语了^。40

This maxim from the Chinese ‘36 Strategems’ refers to a technique whereby an opponent is gradually lulled into a false sense of confidence, thinking the structures he relies on are still sound, although in fact they have been undermined or suborned. Evidently to do this the strategist must be on close terms with the enemy’s organisation, as he may well be, after suffering apparent total defeat and accepting surrender. In the case of the Mongols—who never, incidentally, accepted serious use of the examination system, and so were vulnerable to the growth of local lordships—it proved possible within a century to build up sufficient regional power bases to unseat the central government. With the Manchu, it was more difficult, since they themselves, conscious of their small numbers, made effective use of Chinese institutions such as the examinations to recruit loyal cadres. They also concentrated themselves in the military. Still, making up no more than 2 per cent of the population, it proved impossible for them to live with the Chinese and not be absorbed by them. In vain were they forbidden by law from intermarrying with Chinese or adopting Chinese customs, in vain compulsorily educated in Manchu, a language that continued in government papers until the fall of the dynasty in 1911: nevertheless, within 150 years of their successful conquest of China, all those of Manchu ancestry were speaking Chinese.⁴⁰

这也引出了中国目前对西方挑战的回应。令人匪夷所思却又颇具启发性的是，中国再次采用了这种传统策略。

It also leads us to the current Chinese response to the challenge from the Western world. Bizarrely, but revealingly, China is again adopting this traditional strategy.

经历了十九世纪西方列强的蹂躏之后，中国于1905年废除了科举制度，并于1911年废除了皇室。当时，一股将国家现代化、向欧洲模式靠拢的风潮席卷全国。甚至有人提议废除汉语，转而使用世界语。世界语是一种人为创造的国际语言，由一位波兰人在十九世纪末期以欧洲语言为基础创造，并在当时风靡一时。最终，在二十世纪二三十年代，汉语的官方形式被重新定义：取代了可以追溯到公元前五世纪的文言，取而代之的是白话，即北京地区使用的普通话口语。白话以汉字书写，体现了口语的语法和词汇，但对实际发音则保持中立。这倒也不算太令人意外，因为这种语言至少从公元第一个千年中期起就已流行，甚至被用于通俗文学作品中，^*但此前从未给人以严肃商务语言的感觉。^†

After its traumatic experiences at the hands of Western powers in the nineteenth century, China abolished the examination system in 1905 and the imperial monarchy itself in 1911. A general air prevailed of bringing the country up to date, European-style. One suggestion considered was even to abolish the Chinese language itself in favour of Esperanto, an artificial but would-be international language fashioned by a Pole out of European roots in the late nineteenth century, and in particular vogue at the time. In the event, during the 1920s and 1930s the official form of Chinese was redefined: in place of wényán, which went back to the fifth century BC, came báihuà, ‘white speech’, the colloquial form of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. Written in characters, it represents colloquial grammar and lexicon, but is of course neutral on actual pronunciation. This was not too much of a shock, since it had been current, and indeed used in popular literature,^* since at least the middle of the first millennium AD, but had never previously had the feel of a language for serious business.^†

中国目前正处于经济高速发展的时期，并有意识地采纳了西方模式。从某种意义上说，这是近一个世纪以来受西方启发的第三次革命：1911年共和国成立、1949年共产党革命以及毛泽东逝世后推行的资本主义改革，都是对西方思想的应用。而在此之前，中国自公元六七世纪佛教广泛传播以来，就未曾真正内化过任何重要的西方思想。如果中国能够成功地采纳并改造这些思想，使其符合自身的长远利益，那么它将再次把对手看似决定性的胜利转化为自身更为持久的胜利。这无疑是新的支柱和梁柱。

China is now in a period of extremely rapid economic development, in which it has consciously adopted Western methods. In a sense this is the third Western-inspired revolution in a century, since the foundation of the republic in 1911, the communist revolution in 1949 and the initiation of capitalist reforms since Mao’s death were all applications of Western ideas. All this in a country that had not internalised a major Western idea since the widespread take-up of Buddhism in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. If China succeeds in adopting and adapting these ideas in its own long-term interests, it will once again have turned the apparently conclusive victory of its adversary into a longer-scale triumph of its own. New beams and pillars indeed.

但如果我们再次将目光转向埃及的情况，汉语的长远未来或许岌岌可危。我们发现，埃及和汉语能够延续数千年的共同之处在于，它们在语言社群内部都维持着一个独特的身份认同和忠诚中心。

But if we take up again our comparison with the Egyptian case, the long-term future of the Chinese language may be hanging in the balance. The common feature we have found, which explains both Egyptian and Chinese persistence over so many millennia, is the maintenance of a distinct centre of identity and loyalty within the language community.

埃及逐渐失去了其历史中心的诸多方面，先是君主制，然后是政治独立，接着是本国宗教，最后是本国的基督教形式，埃及在漫长的历史长河中不断衰落，如今，作为一种仅用于正式宗教仪式的语言，埃及语已濒临消亡。如果这种类比成立，那么拥有十亿人口的中国或许也应该意识到，它如今也已踏上了一条充满危险的道路。为了应对来自现代欧洲世界的挑战，中国已经放弃了与君主制的联系——这一理想曾被中国人民认同了两千多年。中国并未放弃政治独立，但至少在官方层面上，它已经放弃了自身的宗教信仰：自君主制覆灭以来，中国不再积极维护儒家思想的价值，更遑论道家思想。

Gradually losing aspects of its historic centre, in the form first of its monarchy, then of its political independence, then of its own national religion, and finally of its national form of Christianity, Egyptian weakened steadily over the ages, and has now, as a language simply recited in formal liturgy, come close to disappearing altogether. If the analogy is valid, Chinese, despite its billion speakers, might consider that it too has now entered on a perilous path. To accommodate the challenge from the modern, European-inspired, world, it has already given up the link with its own monarchy, an ideal with which it had identified for over two millennia. It has not given up its political independence, but it has, at least officially, resigned its own religion: since the fall of the monarchy, it has no longer actively sustained the value of Confucian, much less Taoist, ideas.

中国的政治独立或许能使汉语免于重蹈埃及语的覆辙。即便在外族统治下，汉语也展现出比埃及语过去两千年来更强的韧性和吸收能力。它拥有埃及语从未具备的优势：不仅人口密度高，而且人口绝对数量也极其庞大。就书写而言，汉语历史上尚无任何事件可以与埃及语失去本土文字系统并采用希腊字母相提并论，尽管罗马化进程或许终将到来。

China’s political independence may yet save its language from the downward slide of Egyptian. And even under foreign rule, Chinese has shown itself much more resilient, and indeed absorbent, than Egyptian ever was in its last two millennia. It has the advantage, which Egyptian never had, not just of high density but also of vast absolute population size. In its written mode, there is nothing yet in the history of Chinese to compare with Egyptian’s loss of its indigenous writing system and adoption of the Greek script, though romanisation may yet come.

总之，我们所指出的导致埃及衰落的文化衰退，除了政治征服之外，在中国近代史上都能找到类似的例证。对于如今占世界五分之一人口的语言而言，其命运或许已然注定。

In sum, the cultural retreats that we identified as leading to Egyptian’s demise all have their analogues in the recent history of Chinese, except for political conquest. The writing may already be on the wall for the language now spoken by one fifth of mankind.

^*此拼音罗马化拼写代表了公元前五世纪这段文字的现代汉语发音。因此，它代表了词语和句子结构，但并不代表孔子当时使用的发音。

^* This Pinyin romanisation represents a modern Mandarin pronunciation of this text from the fifth century BC. As such it represents the words and the sentence structure, but not the sounds that Confucius would have used.

^†本书中，汉语采用拼音（ pīnyīn zìmŭ）系统进行转写，该系统自1958年起由中国政府正式推广。拼音中的重音符号（ v,v,v,v）表示声调，而非不同的元音发音。辅音中，c对应英语的ts，j对应英语的j，q对应英语的ch，x对应英语的sh。您还会看到zh、ch和sh：它们的读音与j、q和x相似，但发音时舌卷舌，如同紧随其后的是r音。事实上，除东北地区以外的大多数中国人无法区分这些发音。拼音的优点在于简洁、准确和一致（没有旧式西方拼音系统威妥玛拼音和耶鲁拼音中令人烦恼的撇号），但它只能代表现代发音。因此，将其应用于非常古老的词汇和名称时，可能会产生误导。

^† In this book, Chinese is transcribed using the pīnyīn zìmŭ ‘phonetic alphabet’ system, usually known as Pinyin, officially promoted by the Chinese government since 1958. In it, the accents (v,v,v,v) denote tone patterns, not different vowel sounds. Among consonants, c is English ts, j is English j, q English ch, and x English sh. You will also see zh, ch and sh: these are pronounced similarly to j, q and x, but with retroflex tongue, as if there were an r immediately following. Most Chinese outside the north-east area are in fact incapable of making the distinction. Pinyin has the virtue of being compact, accurate and consistent (without the irritating apostrophes of the older Western systems, Wade-Giles and Yale) but it can only claim to represent modern pronunciation. This can be misleading when it is applied to very old words and names.

^“普通话”一词并非源自汉语，而是梵语“māntrin ”（意为“顾问”）的变体，并受到葡萄牙语动词“mandar”（意为“命令”）的影响。 “普通话”意为“通用语言”，这一术语具有包容性，已基本取代了“官方语言”（与汉语“普通话”最接近的词汇）或“国家语言”等旧词，这些旧词指的大致相同。 “汉语”也是一个常用的术语。

^* The word Mandarin is not Chinese at all, but a deformation of the Sanskrit word māntrin, ‘counsellor’, with some influence from the Portuguese verb mandar, ‘command’. Pŭtōnghuá means ‘common language’, a term with an inclusive feel, which has largely replaced older terms such as guāNnhuá, ‘official language’ (the closest to a Chinese equivalent for Mandarin), or guòyŭ, ‘national language’, which referred to much the same thing. Hànyŭ, ‘Han language’, is another term used.

^*这个名称的起源似乎是早期希腊人试图用晚期埃及语n-irw-aR来表示“伟大的河流”，指的是尼罗河三角洲地区的众多支流。这与jatruw（“河流”）有关，jatruw 一直是尼罗河在古典埃及语中的名称（Luft 1992）。

^* The origin of this name seems to be an early Greek attempt to represent late Egyptian n-irw-aR, ‘the-rivers-great’, referring to the Nile’s many streams in the Delta area. This is related to jatruw, ‘(the) river’, always its name in classical Egyptian (Luft 1992).

^†原名只有Kiang，这是一个南亚语系词汇，与越南歌曲中表示“河流”的词（曾经发音为“krong”）和 Mon kruŋ有关，这表明在中国人从北方来到这里之前，这里所说的语言类型（Norman 1988: 18）。

^† The original name was Kiang alone, an Austro-Asiatic word, related to words for ‘river’ in Vietnamese song (once pronounced ’krong’) and Mon kruŋ, showing the kind of language spoken here before Chinese came in from the north (Norman 1988: 18).

^比较san（兄弟）和sānat（姐妹）。大多数抽象名词都具有这种阴性特质，例如maR'at （正义）（总是被视为女神）。有关闪米特语特征的更详细描述，请参见第 35 页及后续章节。

^§ Compare san, ‘brother’, with sānat, ‘sister’. Most abstract nouns share this femininity, e.g. maR ’at, ‘righteousness’ (always conceived as a goddess). See pp. 35ff. for a longer description of Semitic features.

^†这个指代埃及国王的常用词源于希伯来圣经。它代表埃及的pr-'r（伟大的王室），就像用“宫殿”来指代英国君主一样。

^† This common word for the king of Egypt was established by its use in the Hebrew Bible. It represents the Egyptian pr- ’r (House-Great), and so is like using ‘the Palace’ to refer to the British monarch.

^*孟菲斯这个名字实际上指的是佩皮国王大约七百年后在那里建造的金字塔，意为“永恒的美丽”。埃及作为这个国家的名称并不准确。它源于希腊语Aiguptos ，实际上是孟菲斯的称谓，是希腊语əyt kRUW pta的音译，意为“普塔神卡能量的神庙”。kruw是生命力kaR的滋养，通过食物、饮料和祭祀供奉。

^* The name Memphis actually refers to King Pepi’s pyramid there, built some seven hundred years later: ‘stable in beauty’. Egypt is inexact as a name for the country. Reflecting the Greek word Aiguptos, it is in fact a title of Memphis: a slurring of əyt kRUW pta, ‘temple of the Ka-energy of Ptah’. kruw was the sustenance to the life force kaR, given by food and drink, and sacrificial offerings.

^*他们居住在三角洲地区的萨尔乌（赛斯），据传有利比亚血统。

^* Based in Sarw (Sais) in the Delta area, they are rumoured to have been of Libyan ancestry.

^然而，当虚构故事《辛努赫的故事》中的主人公抵达巴勒斯坦北部的雷特杰努时（故事背景设定在公元前20世纪末，当时雷特杰努与埃及的敌人为敌），有人告诉他：“你会在这里感到快乐。你会听到埃及的语言。”正如辛努赫所叙述的，当时雷特杰努的统治者身边已经有埃及人，他们为辛努赫求情（第30节）。这位统治者名叫阿穆拉纳西，显然是亚摩利人。

^* Yet, when the hero of the fictional Tale of Sinuhe reached Retjenu, in northern Palestine (the tale is set at the end of the twentieth century BC, with Retjenu ranged with Egypt’s enemies), he was told: ‘You will be happy here. You will hear the language of Egypt.’ As Sinuhe recounts, there were already Egyptians with the ruler of Retjenu, who had spoken up for him (verse 30). The ruler’s name was Ammulanasi, recognisably Amorite.

^希罗多德在《历史》第二卷第154章中记载，普萨姆泰克将一些埃及男孩送到爱奥尼亚人和卡里亚人那里服侍，让他们学习希腊语，从而建立了埃及翻译阶层。书中没有提到任何希腊人学习埃及语。

^* Herodotus, ii. 154, recounts that Psamtek put some Egyptian boys into the service of the Ionians and Carians, to be taught Greek, and thereby founded the Egyptian caste of interpreters. There is no reference to any Greeks studying Egyptian.

^*普鲁塔克，《安东尼传》，第27卷，第4-5章。克利奥帕特拉时代的亚历山大街头肯定都曾出现过这些语言。埃塞俄比亚语是库什人的语言，叙利亚语是阿拉姆语的一种。特罗戈迪特语通行于红海沿岸，或许是现代贝贾语的祖先。梅杰伊人（据推测也是贝贾语）是生活在埃及东部沙漠的一个民族，在13至15世纪期间曾被埃及人雇佣为警察（Gardiner 1957: 183, n. 2）。这里没有提到利比亚语，也没有提到拉丁语，尽管普鲁塔克补充说，据说克利奥帕特拉除了他提到的语言之外，还会说许多其他语言。她与凯撒以及后来的安东尼的恋情很可能是用希腊语进行的。

^* Plutarch, Antony, xxvii.4-5. All these languages must have been heard on the streets of Alexandria in Cleopatra’s day. Ethiopian would be the language of Kush, and Syriac is a form of Aramaic. Trogodyte would have been spoken along the Red Sea coast, and is perhaps the ancestor of modern Beja. The Medjay, supposed to be the same, had been an eastern desert people employed in Egypt as police in the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries (Gardiner 1957: 183, n. 2). There is no mention here of Libyan—or of Latin, although Plutarch adds that Cleopatra is said to have spoken many other languages besides the ones he does mention. Most likely her amours with Caesar, and later Antony, were conducted in Greek.

^*最后一块铭文刻在神圣的菲莱岛上，就在尼罗河第一瀑布的上方，象征着埃及最远的边陲。这座神殿的最终亵渎——也是埃及境内最远、也是最后一次亵渎——得到了罗马皇帝查士丁尼的认可（Johnson 1999: 229）。

^* The last inscription was made on the sacred island of Philae, just above the Nile’s first cataract and symbolically the farthest outpost of the land of Egypt. The final desecration of the shrine, the last as well as the farthest in Egypt, was ratified by the Roman emperor Justinian (Johnson 1999: 229).

^数千年来，书写材料不断演变。早期，我们对当时书写材料的了解自然依赖于其耐久性，因此青铜和骨器在早期占据主导地位。后来（公元前一千年起），人们开始使用毛笔在竹条上书写。之后出现了更灵活的材料，这些都是中国独有的发明：公元前二世纪的丝绸卷轴和公元105年的纸张。印刷术也是中国对世界语言技术的贡献：公元九世纪末，人们开始雕刻固定的木版来印刷整页文字；十一世纪，活字印刷术问世。当然，对于一个始终使用数千个符号的文字系统来说，活字印刷的难度更大。

^* Materials for writing changed over the millennia. For the early period our knowledge of what was current is of course reliant on its durability, hence the early prominence of bronze and bone. Later on (from the first millennium) the brush was used to write on strips of bamboo. More flexible materials, distinctive Chinese inventions, came later: rolls of silk from the second century BC, and paper from AD 105. Printing too was a Chinese contribution to world language technology: fixed blocks were cut to print whole pages from the end of the ninth century AD, and movable type was introduced from the eleventh. Naturally this last was harder work with a writing system that has always used several thousand symbols.

^†孟子（据Brooks 2002年记载，约公元前250年）《文集》3.B.6：“楚国某大臣欲其子学齐语……”显然，雄心勃勃之人已开始着手学习汉语。齐大致位于今天的山东，黄河入海口，因此是汉语传播的中心。奇怪的是，仅仅十年后成书的一篇文献似乎选择楚语与东方蛮夷语言进行对比：“楚人入戎，戎人入楚，楚人说戎，戎人说楚。”（《鲁士春秋》4.E）。

^† Mencius (c.250 BC according to Brooks 2002), 3.B.6: ‘Suppose some great officer of Chu wanted his son to learn to speak Qi …’ Evidently, the ambitious were already setting themselves to learn Chinese. Qi was approximately modern Shandong, at the mouth of the Huang-he, and so at the centre of the spread of Chinese. Strangely, a text written only a decade or so later seems to pick Chu to contrast with an eastern barbarian language: ‘Let a Chu man grow up among Rong, or a Rong man grow up in Chu, and the Chu man will speak Rong, while the Rong man will speak Chu’ (Lushi Chunqiu, 4.E).

^{这些举措可以与亚述和巴比伦国王在取得重大军事胜利后下令进行的人口锐减相提并论。（参见第三章“阿卡德——世界领先的技术：识字典范”，第64页。）但}由于美索不达米亚国王认为外国人构成最大威胁，他们最终在其帝国中引入了一种外来语言——阿拉姆语；中国皇帝认为中国封建领主构成威胁，便将他们（以及汉语）传播到其领土的最远角落。

^* These moves can be compared with the depopulations ordered by the kings of Assyria and Babylon after major military victories. (See Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 64.) But since the Mesopotamian kings saw the greatest threat in foreigners, they ended up seeding their empire with a foreign language, Aramaic; the Chinese emperor, seeing threat in Chinese feudal lords, disseminated them (and therewith the Chinese language) to the farthest corners of his realm.

^§这常被认为是“中国”这个名称的词源，这个名称似乎是通过波斯语和意大利语传入西方的。但中国人更倾向于使用汉朝或唐朝的名称作为国名，而国名的形式表明它源自梵语“ Cīna”。这个名称主要指西藏地区，但也有时包括阿萨姆邦和缅甸（Sircar 1971: 104-5）。印度人称整个中国为“Mahācīna”，意为“大中华”：例如，中国僧人玄奘在公元629年访问印度时，就告诉印度人他来自这里。《思忖记》卷一（见Beal 1884，第一部分：216）。

^§ This is often proposed as the etymology for the name China, a name that seems to have reached the West through Persian and Italian. But the Chinese use rather the names of the Han or Tang dynasties as the name of their nation, and the form of the name suggests that it is derived from the Sanskrit name, Cīna. This applied mainly to the area of Tibet, though also on occasions included Assam and Burma (Sircar 1971: 104-5). China as a whole was known to the Indians as Mahācīna, ‘Great China’: this, for example, is where the Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang told the Indians he was from, when he visited in 629. Si-Yu-Ki, v. 1 (in Beal 1884, part 1: 216).

^*中亚的阿尔泰山脉是这个名称的由来，而阿尔泰山脉本身则因其盛产黄金而得名：参见土耳其语altin。

^* The Altai mountains of central Asia, the source of this name, are themselves named for their gold: cf. Turkish altin.

^*这看起来很像汉语对匈奴人的发音，这使得这些人可以与印度人所称的“Hūna”和欧洲人所称的“Hunni”联系起来。但遗憾的是，语音上的相似性仍然是唯一有力的证据。（参见Sinor 1990: 177-9。）

^* This looks very much like a Chinese rendition of Hunnu, which would allow these people to be identified with those known to the Indians as Hūna, and to the Europeans as Hunni. But the phonetic resemblance unfortunately remains the only strong evidence. (See Sinor 1990: 177-9.)

^*在现代汉语中被称为土巴（Tùobá），当时使用的汉字发音为Tak-B'uat。这个名称演变成了现代的楚瓦什（Chuvash）：它仍然指代一个讲突厥语的民族，该民族有150万人散居在俄罗斯和西伯利亚（Clauson 2002 [1962]: 38; Dalby 1998: 134-5）。

^* Called in modern Chinese Tùobá, using characters that at the time would have been pronounced Tak-B’uat. The name has become the modern Chuvash: it still designates a Turkic-speaking people of whom there are 1.5 million scattered across Russia and Siberia (Clauson 2002 [1962]: 38; Dalby 1998: 134-5).

^* 1366 年通过的《基尔肯尼法令》要求英国殖民者（第三部分）“使用英语，并以英语名字称呼，完全摒弃爱尔兰人使用的命名方式……”

^* The Statute of Kilkenny was passed in 1366, requiring the English colonists (section III) ‘to use the English language, and be called by an English name, leaving off entirely the manner of naming used by the Irish …’

^简而言之，北方汉语失去了所有尾辅音；原本自由的单音节词串逐渐合并成更长的词。个中缘由至今无人知晓，但人们提出了一些解释。或许，汉语语素在失去如此多的显著辅音后，语义变得模糊，因此需要用一个词来强化另一个词，才能有效地进行交流。或许，新形成的短音节在语音上本身就较弱，因此必须通过音节重叠来使语言具有可接受的语调节奏（冯1998）。或许，佛教的传入，伴随着梵语和巴利语的吟诵，引入了更长的词汇，而这些词汇在翻译成汉语时产生的复杂表达方式，使人们逐渐习惯了多音节语言。威尔金森（2000:31-40）对各种趋势和可能的影响进行了清晰的探讨。

^† Briefly put, northern Chinese lost all its final consonants; and strings of previously free monosyllables became congealed into longer words. No one knows why, but some explanations for the changes have been proposed. Perhaps the semantic vagueness of Chinese morphemes, after losing so many distinctive consonants, meant that reinforcing one word with another was necessary in order to communicate effectively. Perhaps the sheer phonetic weakness of the new shorter syllables meant that doubling up had to occur to give the language an acceptable speech rhythm (Feng 1998). Perhaps the advent of Buddhism, with chanting in Sanskrit and Pali which introduced longer words, and the complicated expressions that arose when they were translated into Chinese, inured people to polysyllabism. The various trends and possible influences are clearly discussed in Wilkinson (2000:31-40).

^但这种趋势在所有汉语方言中都能看到（事实上，在更南方的彝语和越南语中也能看到）。

^* But this same trend can be seen in all Chinese dialects (and indeed farther south in the Yi and Vietnamese languages).

^* “南越”。汉语的“南越” 和现代越南语的 “南越”其实是同一个词，只是发音不同，顺序也不同，所以这个名称在两千年后仍然很流行，它的位置向西南方向移动了750公里。

^* ‘Southern Yue’. Mandarin Nán-Yuè and modern Vietnamese Vi&t Nam are just the same words, pronounced differently and reordered, so the name is still going strong two millennia on, its designation moved 750 kilometres to the south-west.

^菲律宾有五十万华人，泰国有一百八十万华人，几乎都讲闽南语。马来西亚有四百五十万华人，其中一半讲闽南语或闽东语，四分之一讲客家话，六分之一讲粤语，其余的（约五十万）讲普通话。印尼有六百万华人，汉语在印尼语中已基本消失，只有三分之一的人在家中仍会说某种形式的汉语；而在这些人中，超过三分之一讲闽南语，略低于三分之一讲客家话，不到十分之一讲粤语。其余四分之一讲普通话（Grimes 2000）。

^* In the Philippines, there are half a million Chinese, and in Thailand 1.8 million, almost all speaking Southern Min. Of Malaysia’s 4.5 million Chinese speakers, half speak Southern or Eastern Min, a quarter speak Hakka, a sixth speak Yue, the rest (still half a million of them) speaking Mandarin. Chinese has largely died on the lips of Indonesia’s 6 million ethnic Chinese, and only a third of them still speak some form of it in the home: but of those who do, over a third speak Min, a little less than a third Hakka, just under a tenth Yue. The remaining quarter speak Mandarin (Grimes 2000).

^*该术语最初用于葡萄牙语，源自阿拉伯-波斯语firengi，最终源自法兰克语。

^* This term, first applied to the Portuguese, derives from Arab-Persian firengi, ultimately from Frank.

^*这两个帝国都曾极少数情况下允许女性担任国王，例如埃及的哈特谢普苏特（公元前1473-1458年）和克利奥帕特拉（公元前51-30年），以及中国的武则天（公元690-705年）和慈禧太后（公元1895-1908年）。令人感到诡异的是，这两个王朝在延续数千年后，最终都终结于一位女性的统治之下。

^* Both empires very occasionally permitted a woman to take up the office of king, notably Hatshepsut ( 1473-1458 BC) and Cleopatra (51-30 BC) of Egypt, and the empresses Wu (AD 690-705) and Ci Xi (AD 1895-1908) of China. Eerily, it was in the reign of a woman that both monarchies, after so many millennia, came to their end.

^*他们对印度的看法将在下文第 192 页及后续章节中讨论。

^* Their views of India are considered at pp. 192ff. below.

^†梵语 atlta, pratyutpanna, anagata, 'past by', 'given in the presence', 'not come'。

^† Sanskrit atlta, pratyutpanna, anagata, ‘past by’, ‘given in the presence’, ‘not come’.

^他们普遍对中国同时代人的行事方式印象深刻，以至于公元7世纪，朝鲜和日本甚至也引入了科举制度，以选拔官员进入政府。（与此同时，越南在公元第一个千年里一直处于中国的直接统治之下。）但他们只是照搬，绝非出于对科举制度的理解：日本只允许贵族参加科举；而在朝鲜，出身较高的家庭的子弟则可以免考。

^* So generally impressed were they with the way that their Chinese contemporaries did things that in the seventh century AD Korea and Japan even introduced the system of public examinations for entry into the government. (Vietnam, meanwhile, was spending the whole first millennium AD under direct Chinese rule.) But they did it as copycats, emphatically not because they appreciated the point of the system: the Japanese permitted only nobles to sit the examination; and in Korea, sons of higher-graded families were exempted.

除了克利奥帕特拉那场著名的炫技表演之外，佩雷曼斯（1964）在托勒密王朝时期的埃及几乎没有发现双语现象的证据，而且大部分希腊人和埃及人（当地人称之为“ egkhōrioi ”）都坚持使用自己的语言。^一些著名的埃及人，例如埃及的大祭司兼希腊历史学家马内托，确实在当时仍然以希腊语为主的等级制度中身居高位。但由于公共文件大多是双语的（其中最著名的当属罗塞塔石碑，此外还有一些与私人案件相关的司法公告），因此民众不可能同时使用两种语言。他还引用了一封感人的信：“得知你正在学习埃及文字，我既为你也为我自己感到高兴，因为现在你可以来城里教法鲁的孩子们……也就是灌肠医生，这样你晚年就有了谋生的手段”（第57页）。尽管提到了写作，但这位家庭教师大概是要教埃及中产阶级的孩子们希腊语，而不是反过来。

^* Aside from Cleopatra’s well-known bravura performance, Peremans ( 1964) finds little evidence of bilingualism in Ptolemaic Egypt, and much of Greeks and Egyptians (egkhōrioi, ‘locals’) sticking to their own languages. Some famous Egyptians, such as the high priest and Greek historian of Egypt, Maněthō, did reach high rank in what remained to the end a Greek-speaking hierarchy. But so many public documents were bilingual (the most famous being the Rosetta Stone, but also judicial notices relating to private cases) that the population could not have been. He also quotes a touching letter: ‘I was glad, both for you and for myself, to learn that you were learning Egyptian writing, because now you can come to the city and teach the children of Phalu … es the enema doctor, and have a means of support for your old age’ (p. 57). Despite the mention of writing, the tutor was presumably to be employed to teach the middle-class Egyptian children Greek, not vice versa.

^*与本书中讨论的大多数其他主流语言群体不同，中国人有一点不同：他们没有将所有说其他语言的人都笼统地归入一个带有贬义的词汇之下。“蛮夷”一词在英语翻译中不可避免，但汉语词汇众多，原则上每个词汇都有不同的指称。早在公元前三世纪的词典《雅利安》（ Erya ，意为“精妙用法的例证”）中，就对“sìhši” （意为“九义、八地、七戎、六满”）一词进行了定义： jiŭyí bādí qīróng liŭmán （ 《雅利安》，sv Sidí，引自Wilkinson 2000: 710）。还有一个词是 “藩”（Fān），从中国人的角度来看，它又分为“生藩”（shēngfān）和“熟藩”（shúfān），分别指“生的”和“熟的”，取决于他们是否已经开始接受文明的汉族生活方式。但这种多样性并不代表对弱势群体有任何特殊的辨别力或尊重。尽管这些不同的词汇都是语言的一部分，但它们经常被混用，例如“荣地”（Róngdí）、“义地”（Yídí），或者被不加区分地使用。事实上，这些单音节的概括性词汇还会辅以针对特定部落的更具体的词汇。这些具体的词汇常常被写出来，就像一种中国人之间的玩笑，带有侮辱性的字眼，例如“奴” （nú ）出现在“奴隶” （Xiōngnú ）中， “矮人” （wō ）出现在“矮人国” （Wōgŭo）中，即“矮人国”，也就是日本。出于一种文明的恶意，这个词碰巧在日语中发音与 “和”（wa，意为“和谐”）相同，而“和”是日本人用来指代自己的词语。

^* The Chinese have been unlike most other dominant language communities reviewed in this book in one way: they have not lumped all those speaking other languages under one unflattering name. The single term ‘barbarian’ is inescapable in English translation, but Chinese has many words, in principle all with different designations. Already in the third-century BC dictionary Erya (’Examples of Refined Usage’), the term sìhši is defined: jiŭyí bādí qīróng liŭmán, ‘the 9 Yi, the 8 Di, the 7 Rong and the 6 Man’ (Erya, s.v. Sidí, cited in Wilkinson 2000: 710). Yet another term was Fān, from the Chinese point of view divided into the , shēngfān, and , shúfān, ‘raw’ or ‘cooked’, depending on whether they had begun to settle to civilised Chinese ways. Not that this multiplicity betokened any particular discernment or respect for the lesser breeds. Although the different words were part of the language, they were often lumped together, e.g. Róngdí, Yídí, or used undiscriminatingly. In fact, the monosyllabic blanket terms are supplemented with more specific terms for particular tribes. These were often written out, as a kind of Chinese private joke, with insulting characters, e.g. nú, ‘slave’, in Xiōngnú, and wō, ‘dwarf’, in Wōgŭo, ‘dwarf-realm’, i.e. Japan. With urbane malice, this chanced to be pronounced in Japanese identically with wa, ‘harmony’, the term the Japanese preferred when referring to themselves.

^*十六至十八世纪中国著名小说，特别是曹雪芹的《红楼梦》、罗贯中的《三国演义》和吴承恩的《西游记》，都是用这种汉语方言写成的。

^* The famous Chinese novels of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, notably Hongloumeng, “The Dream of the Red Chamber’, by Cao Xueqin, Sanguozhi Yanyo, ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’, by Luo Guanzhong, and Xiyouji, ‘Journey to the West’, by Wu Cheng-en, were all written in this dialect of Chinese.

^†也曾有人尝试用罗马化文字取代汉字，但由于很难找到一种能够兼顾不同方言的中立系统，因此这些尝试最终都未能取得实质性进展，仅仅沦为学习者和外国人的辅助工具。本书使用的拼音罗马化系统代表了标准汉语，如今已接近国际标准。该系统由俄罗斯学者合作开发，并于1957年正式出版。

^† There were also a number of attempts to replace Chinese characters with a romanised script, but with the acknowledged difficulty of finding a system that could be neutral in terms of the different dialects, none succeeded in becoming anything more than an aid to learners and foreigners. The Pinyin romanisation used in this book represents standard Mandarin, and is now close to being an international standard. It was developed in collaboration with Russian scholars, and published officially in 1957.

5.

魅力如藤蔓：梵语的文化生涯

5

Charming Like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit

bha ā prasastā sumano Lateva

ke ām na cetā sy āvarjayati

bhāā praśastā sumano lateva

keām na cetāsy āvarjayati

语言，吉祥，迷人，如同藤蔓，谁能不被它俘获呢^？

Language, auspicious, charming, like a creeper, whose minds does it not win over?^*

（sūkta —传统格言）

(sūkta—traditional maxim)

故事梗概

The story in brief

人们常常将梵语比作一株蔓生植物，枝繁叶茂，繁花盛开。两千多年来，它遍布亚洲人口中心：从印度次大陆的北部到南部，再到东南亚和东印度群岛，直至青藏高原和远东地区。

There is a persistent image of Sanskrit as a creeping plant, luxuriant and full blossomed. Over two thousand years it spread itself round the centres of Asian population: from north to south of the Indian subcontinent, and thence to South-East Asia and the East Indies, to the Tibetan plateau and to the Far East.

梵语（梵文：sa sk ta ）一词意为“合成的”或“综合的”。它指的是语法书中所定义的梵语，与被称为普拉克里特语（梵文：prā ta）的口语方言（梵文：prā ta）——“自然语”——形成对比。它也将其与一种更古老的语言形式区分开来，这种语言形式有时被称为吠陀语，因其在吠陀经（梵文：Veda）——“知识”——中的使用而闻名。吠陀经是献给神的赞歌，其历史似乎可以追溯到公元前第二个千年末期，即梵语在印度最早出现的时期，但至今仍在印度教仪式中原封不动地吟诵。印度北部和中部的大部分现代语言都是梵语的后裔，是普拉克里特语发展而来的，就像罗曼语族语言是从通俗拉丁语发展而来一样。但在印度次大陆以外，梵语从未成为一种普及语言。它始终是学术交流和神圣表达的媒介，在主要宗教源自印度的地区最为盛行。

The word Sanskrit (saskta) means ‘composed’ or ‘synthesised’. It is a term for the language as formulated in the grammar books, contrasting it with its colloquial dialects, known as the Prakrits (prāta), the ‘naturals’. It also distinguishes it from an older form, sometimes called Vedic, known from its use in the Veda, ‘the knowledge’: these are hymns to the gods which appear to go back to the earliest days of the language as spoken in India, in the last centuries of the second millennium BC, but which are still recited unchanged in Hindu rituals today. Most of the modern languages of northern and central India are descendants of Sanskrit, developed versions of the Prakrits, much as the Romance languages developed from forms of vulgar Latin. But outside the Indian subcontinent, Sanskrit was never taken up as a popular language; it remained purely a medium of learned communication and sacred expression, strongest where the dominant religion had come from India.

尽管宗教传统在许多化身（“降临”，如同神灵从天而降）中证明了梵语最可靠的保存者，尽管在当今西方，梵语与超验精神主义有着密切的联系，但梵语从来都不仅仅是一种礼拜语言。

Although it is religious tradition which has proved the most reliable preserver of Sanskrit in many an avatāra (’descent’, as of a divine being from heaven), and despite the heavy association, in the West today, of the language with transcendental spiritualism, Sanskrit was never just a liturgical language.

甚至吠陀经中也包含着对“mā ūkā”（青蛙）的欢快而又略带讽刺的描述，它们与^婆罗门祭司阶层有着双重相似之处：它们发誓一年内保持沉默（直到雨季）；当它们开口说话时，“其中一只会重复另一只的话，就像学生重复老师的话一样”。它还让我们想起一个沉迷赌博的人的苦涩自怜，^他被“ babhrava ”（棕色坚果）所奴役，这些坚果当时被用作骰子： rājā cid ebhyo nama it k oti，“即使是国王也会向它们鞠躬……”他为自己辩解道，继续说道：tasmai k omi, 'na dhanā ru adhmi' daśāham prācīs, 'tad tam vadāmi'。我向他展示我空空如也的手掌：“我没有对你隐瞒——我说的都是实话。”

Even the Vedic corpus contains a joyous yet wry evocation of māūkā,¹ ‘frogs’, doubly like the priestly caste of Brahmans: they take a vow of silence for a year (until the rainy season); and when they do pipe up ‘one of them repeats the speech of the other, as the learner does of his teacher’. It also brings us the wry self-pity of a compulsive gambler,² enslaved to babhrava, ‘the browns’, the nuts then used as dice: rājā cid ebhyo nama it koti, ‘even a king bows before them...’ he excuses himself, going on: tasmai komi, ‘na dhanā ruadhmi’ daśāham prācīs, ‘tad tam vadāmi’. ‘I show him my empty palms: “I am not holding out on you—it’s the truth, I tell you."’

后来，梵语的内容变得极其广泛，其中最著名的作品包括浪漫喜剧、理论语言学、经济学、性学（尤其是《爱经》）、抒情诗、历史和道德寓言，以及持续不断的史诗、宗教和哲学论著。它是一种非常注重自我表达的文学传统，充满了博学的典故，尤其值得一提的是，它对双关语的运用堪称世间最为精妙。

Later on, Sanskrit becomes very wide ranging in its content, including among its most widely known works romantic comedy, theoretical linguistics, economics, sexology (notably the Kāma Sūtra), lyrical verse, history and moral fables, along with a continuing production of epic poetry and religious and philosophical tracts. It is a very self-conscious literary tradition, full of learned allusions, and above all the most elaborate development of the pun known anywhere on earth.

我们首先概述一下梵语在亚洲的传播情况。

We begin with an outline of how Sanskrit was spread across Asia.

这是一种印度-伊朗语方言，最早发现于西北边境地区的斯瓦特和旁遮普北部（今巴基斯坦境内），使用者显然来自更北或更西的地方，他们喜欢自称为雅利安人（ārya，后来成为“绅士”的常用词，也是佛教徒用来形容高尚精神的常用词）。不知何故，他们的后裔，尤其是他们的语言，传播到了广袤的印度-恒河平原，以及喜马拉雅山脉（意为“雪域”）的南部地区。到公元前五世纪初，这种语言的使用范围已向东延伸至比哈尔邦，向南可能到达纳尔默达河。这一时期的梵文文学，主要是史诗《摩诃婆罗多》（意为“伟大的婆罗多”）和《罗摩衍那》（意为“罗摩的到来”），充满了军事功绩和征服的故事。

A dialect of Indo-Iranian, it is first heard of in the North-West Frontier area of Swat and the northern Panjab (now in Pakistan), spoken by peoples who have evidently come from farther north or west, and who like to call themselves ārya (later a common word for ‘gentleman’, and always the Buddhists’ favourite word for sheer nobility of spirit). Somehow their descendants, and even more their language, spread down over the vast Indo-Gangetic plain, as well as up into the southern reaches of the Himālaya (’snow-abode’) mountains, so that by the beginning of the fifth century BC the language was spoken in an area extending as far east as Bihar, and as far south, perhaps, as the Narmada. Sanskrit literature from the period, principally the epic poems Mahābhārata (’Great Bharata’) and Rāmāyaa (’The Coming of Rama’), is full of military exploits and conquests.

其结果便是如今的局面：印度北部一片从东海岸延伸至西海岸的语言中心地带，其语言或多或少与梵语密切相关。这片中心地带在印度一直被称为雅利安人之乡（ Āryāvarta ）。它还在遥远的南方斯里兰卡（Sarī Lankā ）衍生出一个分支，形成了锡哈拉（ Si hala ，意为“狮子”）社群：据传统记载，该社群于公元前五世纪从西北海岸的古吉拉特邦迁徙而来。雅利安人的传播至今仍在阿萨姆邦和尼泊尔北部地区继续，这两个地区的官方语言（阿萨姆语和尼泊尔语或廓尔喀语）都属于雅利安语系，但尚未成为当地绝大多数人口的通用语。

The result was the present-day situation, a northern Indian heartland, stretching from sea to sea, of languages more or less closely related to Sanskrit. This centre is always known in India as Āryāvarta (’abode of the Aryas’). It also gained one offshoot in $SArī Lankā to the far south, creating the Sihala (’lion-y’) community there: according to tradition, this group had come from Gujarat, on the north-western coast, in the fifth century BC. The advance of Aryan is continuing to this day in the northern regions of Assam and Nepal, where the official languages (Assamese, and Nepali or Gurkhali) are both Aryan, but have not yet become the vernaculars of large majorities of their populations.

梵语的传播并非完全是通过将其作为通用语而实现的。即使是像泰卢固语、卡纳达语和泰米尔语这样原本就存在的语言，也常常受到梵语词汇的影响。在语法并非雅利安语系的语言中，这些借词（称为“tat-sama”，意为“相同的”）的数量可能非常庞大。相反，在印度北部的主要语言乌尔都语甚至印地语中，由于后来大量借用波斯语和阿拉伯语词汇的影响，雅利安语的词根可能几乎难以察觉。（这种广泛的文化影响下的借词一直是印度历史语言学的一大难题：在印度，从外来借词中区分语言的传承部分并拼凑其历史最为困难。）

Not all the spread of Sanskrit was through full take-up of the language as a vernacular. Even when pre-existing languages, such as Telugu, Kannada and Tamil, held their own, they were usually permeated with terminology from Sanskrit. It is quite possible for these borrowed words (called tat-sama, ‘that-same’) to be overwhelmingly numerous in a language whose grammar is non-Aryan. Conversely, in Urdu, or even Hindi, majority languages of northern India, Aryan roots may be almost invisible under the heavy influence of later borrowings from Persian and Arabic. (This widespread culturally induced borrowing has been the bane of Indian historical linguistics: nowhere has it been harder to sift the inherited part of languages from foreign borrowings, and so piece together their history.)

梵语化的进程并未止步于次大陆的边界。公元第一个千年间，印度航海商人和传教士不仅在斯里兰卡，也在东南亚沿海的许多地方登陆。在这里，梵语首先作为一种精英文明和宗教（无论是印度教还是佛教）的语言传播开来，但其影响，以及对梵语作为高雅文化载体的研究，都十分深远。这一地区被称为印度支那，名副其实，因为它成为了印度和中国文化相互交融的熔炉。

The process of Sanskritisation did not stop at the boundaries of the subcontinent. Over the course of the first millennium AD, Indian seafaring traders or missionaries made landfall, not only in Śri Lanka, but also in many places along the coasts of South-East Asia. Here, the language spread above all as a language of elite civilisation and religion (whether Hindu or Buddhist), but the influence, and evidently the study made of Sanskrit as a vehicle of high culture, was profound. The region is known as Indo-China, quite rightly, for it became a crucible for the competing cultural influences of India and China.

但当梵语沿着北路绕过喜马拉雅山脉，传至西藏、中国、朝鲜和日本时，佛陀教义的魅力才是其传播的根本原因。佛陀生活在公元前五世纪，位于恒河下游河谷，当时人们说的是一种被称为摩揭陀语的俗语。在接下来的两百年里，他创立的佛教遍及印度和斯里兰卡，并传入缅甸。佛教经典大多以与其密切相关的巴利语写成，但随着时间的推移，也越来越多地使用古典梵语。除了传播到东南亚之外，佛教最具影响力的传播路径是到达克什米尔，并最终回到梵语的发源地旁遮普和斯瓦特。

But when Sanskrit took its path northward, round the Himalayas to Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, it was above all the attractions of the Buddha’s teachings which caused the spread of the language. The Buddha had lived in the fifth century BC, in the lower valley of the Ganges, speaking a Prakrit known as Magadhi. In the next two hundred years the faith he founded spread all over India and Śri Lanka, as well as into Burma, its scriptures largely written in a closely related Prakrit, Pali, but also, more and more over time, in classical Sanskrit. Besides the spread to South-East Asia, the most influential path that Buddhism took was to Kashmir, and back to the homeland of Sanskrit itself in Panjab and Swat.

因此，公元一世纪，佛教及其经典向北传播，或许再次沿着一千多年前梵语使用者进入印度的历史路线北上。但越过巴克特里亚后，它并没有左转进入中亚草原，而是右转，沿着丝绸之路进入中国。佛教被新兴的唐朝接纳，并最终由唐朝传播，与中国文化融为一体。之后，佛教及其梵文和巴利文经典最终传入朝鲜和日本，成为其最东端的传播地，于公元六世纪末抵达。

Hence in the first century AD Buddhism, with its attendant scriptures, spread northward, perhaps here again trekking back up the historic route that Sanskrit speakers had used to enter India over a millennium before. But past Bactria, instead of turning left into the central Asian steppes, it turned right and, picking up the Silk Road, headed into China. Received by the rising Tang dynasty, and ultimately propagated by them, Buddhism became coextensive with Chinese culture. Thence it was ultimately transmitted, along with its Sanskrit and Pali scriptures, to Korea and Japan, its most easterly homes, arriving at the end of the sixth century.

其他距离更近的地区接受佛教教义的时间要长得多，其传播媒介依然是巴利语和梵语。尼泊尔在公元前3世纪阿育王时期就已是佛教在印度早期传播的一部分；但第一位被邀请进入西藏的印度僧人寂护，是在公元8世纪下半叶才抵达的，这比佛陀在摩揭陀国（位于西藏以南仅200英里，当然，是在喜马拉雅山脉的另一侧）生活的时间晚了整整1200年；而佛教直到11世纪才在西藏真正扎根。

Other, closer, areas took much longer to receive the doctrine, borne as ever by its vehicles Pali and Sanskrit. Nepal had been part of the early Indian spread of Buddhism under Aśoka, in the third century BC; but the first Indian monk invited into Tibet, Śāntarak⋅ita, came in the second half of the eighth century AD, a full 1200 years after the Buddha had lived just two hundred miles to the south (admittedly, over the Himalayas) in Magadha; and the religion was firmly established in Tibet only in the eleventh century.

佛教（以及神圣的梵文）大规模传播的最后一个地区是蒙古，它是佛教最北端的发源地。几个世纪以来，藏族和蒙古族之间一直保持着密切的联系。蒙古族在1280年至1368年间统治中国。例如，在西方广为人知的蒙古皇帝忽必烈汗（他曾接待过马可·波罗）在十四世纪初就热衷于将佛教传播到蒙古本土。但这一目标直到后来才由中国传教士最终实现：1578年，蒙古的阿尔坦汗代表其整个帝国接受了藏传佛教的一种形式。

The last area to be exposed to Buddhism (and hence sacred Sanskrit) on a large scale was Mongolia, its northernmost home. For many centuries there were strong links between the Tibetans and the Mongols, who from 1280 to 1368 achieved ascendancy over China. Kublai Khan, for example, the Mongol emperor of China well known in the West as the host of Marco Polo, was keen to spread Buddhism to the Mongol homeland in the early fourteenth century. But this aim was only achieved permanently by Chinese preachers rather later: in 1578 the Altan Khan of Mongolia accepted a version of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, on behalf of his whole realm.

因此，梵语拥有悠久的历史，并与南亚、东亚和中亚各地使用其他语言的文化都有过接触。由此可见一个有趣的普遍规律：尽管梵语在其传播到的任何地方都始终是新文化发展的核心，但这种语言接触从未导致其他语言传统的消亡或被取代。这一记录与希腊语、拉丁语、阿拉伯语、西班牙语、法语和英语等大型文明语言所带来的影响（往往是毁灭性的）形成了鲜明的对比。

Sanskrit, then, has a far-flung history, and has been in contact with cultures conducted in other languages all over southern, eastern and central Asia. And an interesting generalisation emerges. Nowhere has this linguistic contact led to loss or replacement of other linguistic traditions, even though Sanskrit has always been central to new cultural developments wherever it has reached. This record makes a striking contrast with the impact, too often devastating, of languages of large-scale campaigning civilisations, such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish, French and English.

但从另一个角度来看，这种对印度文化的广泛接纳与20世纪下半叶席卷全球，尤其是东南亚地区的美国文化热潮极为相似。当时的推动力同样是通过贸易获取利润，以及一种认为伴随外来者而来的全球互联和自由放任文化将提升所有接受这种文化的人们的生活水平的观念。正如古代印度化的进程一样，微软、迈克尔·杰克逊或米老鼠的崛起几乎没有动用任何军事力量。人们几乎感觉不到这种发展是由创新中心的政治力量策划或协调的，无论是当时的印度，还是今天的美国。语言方面的影响也类似：英语和梵语一样，都已成为贸易、国际商务和文化推广的通用语。

But in another way this widespread embrace of Indian culture is highly reminiscent of the enthusiasm for Americana that captured the whole world, and certainly the South-East Asian region, in the second half of the twentieth century. In that advance too the primary motives were the growth of profits through trade, and a sense that the globally connected and laissez-faire culture that came with the foreigners was going to raise the standard of life of all who adopted it. As with the ancient advance of Indianisation, there has been little or no use of the military to reinforce the advance of Microsoft, Michael Jackson or Mickey Mouse. There has been little sense that the advance is planned or coordinated by political powers in the centre of innovation, whether in India then, or in the USA today. And the linguistic effects are similar too: English, like Sanskrit, has advanced as a lingua franca for trade, international business and cultural promotion.

一个主要的差异在于美国英语运动中没有任何宗教因素。它没有任何东西可以与印度教神祇崇拜或佛陀的四圣谛和八正道相抗衡。这一点或许对英语的未来意义重大，因为我们将会看到，最终只有宗教——无论是印度教还是佛教——才能使梵语在印度以外的地方继续发挥作用。但考虑到这一点，比较公元第一个千年初期印度文化的兴起和第二个千年末期美国文化的兴起，似乎更有益于理解，而非误导。

A major dissimilarity is the absence of any religious element in the American movement. There is nothing in it to set against the cult of Hindu deities, or the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path. This may be significant for the future of English, since we shall see that it was ultimately only religion, whether Hindu or Buddhist, which was to preserve any role for Sanskrit outside India. But with this one caveat, it seems more helpful than misleading to compare these two rising tides—of Indian culture in the early first millennium AD, and of American culture at the end of the second.

本章的其余部分将更深入地探讨梵语是一种什么样的语言，以及它为何在南亚和东亚受到如此热烈的欢迎。

The rest of this chapter looks a little more deeply at what kind of language Sanskrit was, and how it came to be received so enthusiastically across southern and eastern Asia.

梵文的字符

The character of Sanskrit

杜里克·塔·哈鲁·古艾尔·乌迪亚纳拉塔·瓦纳拉塔比

dūrīktā khalu guāir udyānalatā vanalatābhi

花园里的藤蔓植物在美德方面远远落后于森林里的藤蔓植物。

Left far behind indeed in virtues are the garden-creepers by the forest-creepers.

卡利达萨 (Kālidāsa)，沙琨塔拉 (Sakuntalā) 已被认可，i。 17 号

Kālidāsa, Śākuntalā Recognised, i. 17

内在品质

Intrinsic qualities

印度文化因其对自身语言的严谨分析而举世无双，并将语言分析奉为自身文化的核心学科。梵语中表示语法的词“vyākara ”并非像希腊语“grammatikē”那样基于逐字逐句的语法或书写，而是仅仅意味着分析：因此，语言是分析的绝佳对象。

Indian culture is unique in the world for its rigorous analysis of its own language, which it furthermore made the central discipline of its own culture. The Sanskrit word for grammar, vyākaraa, instead of being based, like the Greek grammatikē, on some word for word or writing, just means analysis: so language is the subject for analysis par excellence.

公元前二世纪著名语法学家帕坦伽利在其著作《大注释》（ Mahābhā⋅ya）的开篇写道，学习语法有五个原因：保存吠陀经；能够根据新的情况修改吠陀经中的公式；履行宗教义务；尽可能轻松地学习语言；以及解决文本解释中的疑问。³ 由此可见^，即使在吠陀经成书一千年后，语言已经发生了相当大的变化，但人们仍然认为，增强语言在宗教方面的应用仍然是语法的核心目的。

Patanjali, a noted grammarian of the second century BC, wrote at the beginning of his work the Mahābhā⋅ya (’great commentary’) that there were five reasons for studying grammar: to preserve the Vedas, to be able to modify formulae from the Vedas to fit a new situation, to fulfil a religious commitment, to learn the language as easily as possible, and to resolve doubts in textual interpretation.³ So it is clear that even at this stage, a good millennium after the composition of the Vedas, when the language had already changed quite considerably, enhancing the use of language for religious purposes was still felt to be the central point of grammar.

宗教用途在梵语的世界地位中始终占据着举足轻重的地位。印度教的礼拜仪式已连续3500年使用梵语吟诵，这或许与《梨俱吠陀》中最古老的赞歌的年代相同。数千年来，人们崇拜的神祇不断更迭，从吠陀经中的阿耆尼（“火”）、萨维特里（“太阳”）、伐楼那和鲁陀罗，到如今的湿婆、克里希纳、象头神和迦梨（以及其他许多神祇），但有些神祇至今仍然与我们同在（尤其是毗湿奴），而梵语本身的变化却微乎其微。事实上，《梨俱吠陀》中有一首赞歌正是对“梵语”（Vāc，即语言本身）的祈求。以下是其中的两节：

And religious uses have always loomed large in the figure that Sanskrit cuts in the world. Hindu liturgies have been intoned in the language over a continuous period of 3500 years, which is probably the age of the oldest hymns in the Rig Veda. The gods chosen to be the focus of worship have changed over the millennia, from Agni (’Fire’), Savitri (’Sun’), Varuna and Rudra in the Vedas, to Śiva, Krishna, Ganesha and Kali (and many others) today, but some gods are still with us (notably Vishnu), and the language has changed very little. In fact, in the Rig Veda there is one hymn that is an invocation of Vāc, speech itself. Here are two of its verses:

最后几句话展现了梵语中常见的性意象与神秘意象的融合；同时也表明，语言学家的技艺很早就得到了认可。这一点尤其有趣，因为当时的语法学科并非主要分析吠陀经的宗教语言，而是分析一种不同的、略微简单、因而推测出现时间更晚的方言。公元前五世纪梵语语法的奠基人帕尼尼（ Pā ini）必须制定额外的规则，才能从普通梵语（称为“bhāā ”，意为“言语”）的基础生成吠陀经中使用的词形（称为“ chandas ”）。（帕尼尼可能居住在塔克西拉（ Tak aśilā ）的学术社区，希腊人称之为塔克西拉（Taxila），位于次大陆东北部，靠近今天的拉瓦尔品第，现在是巴基斯坦的一部分。）

The last words show a blending of sexual and mystical imagery, often found in Sanskrit; but they also show that the skills of the linguist were early recognised. This is particularly interesting in that the discipline of grammar as it had been developed was an analysis not primarily of the religious language of the Vedas, but of a different, slightly simpler, and therefore presumably later, dialect. Pāini, the original fifth-century BC doyen of Sanskrit grammar, has to give extra rules to generate the forms used in the Vedas (called chandas) from a base in ordinary Sanskrit (designated as bhāā—’speech’). (Panini probably lived in the academic community of Takaśilā, known to the Greeks as Taxila, near modern Rawalpindi in the extreme north-east of the subcontinent, now part of Pakistan.)

此外，该传统所定义的语法是一个庞大的抽象规则体系，由一系列精辟的格言（称为“经”，字面意思是“线索”）构成，这些格言是用人为的术语写成的。这些经与现代语言的计算语法规则非常相似，例如机器翻译系统中使用的规则：它们不包含任何神秘或仪式元素，而是根据抽象的形式原则应用^。

Furthermore, the grammar that the tradition had defined was a vast system of abstract rules, made up of a set of pithy maxims (called sūtras, literally ‘threads’) written in an artificial jargon. These sutras are like nothing so much as the rules in a computational grammar of a modern language, such as might be used in a machine translation system: without any mystical or ritual element, they apply according to abstract formal principles.^*

梵文学术文本以经文的形式呈现，成为其关键特征，但使用的是常规梵文的格言，而非复杂的元语言。西方教诲文本在近代以前通常以希腊传统的方式呈现，例如欧几里得式的公理和定理，或更常见的是赫西俄德式的教诲诗。而梵文传统则更倾向于将论著浓缩成一系列令人难忘的格言，通常以对句诗的形式表达。甚至还有专门的经文来定义优秀经文的特质。

Formulation in sutras became the key feature of Sanskrit academic texts, but using maxims in regular Sanskrit and not this complex meta-language. Whereas Western didactic texts until the modern era were formulated in some Greek tradition as a set of axioms and theorems (after Euclid), or more often as didactic verse (after Hesiod), the preferred approach in the Sanskrit tradition has been to encapsulate treatises as a series of memorable aphorisms, usually phrased as verse couplets. So much so that there is even a sutra to define the qualities of a good sutra:

斯瓦尔帕克·阿拉姆·阿桑迪格达·萨拉瓦德·维施瓦托穆坎

svalpākaram asandigdha sāravad viśvatomukham

阿斯托巴姆阿那瓦迪亚ca sūtra sūtravido vidu

astobham anavadya ca sūtra sūtravido vidu

简短、明确、精辟、普适

brief, unambiguous, pithy, universal,

这部经典没有多余的瑕疵，只有经圣才知道。

non-superfluous and faultless the sutra known to the sutra-sages.

这种做法很大程度上体现了梵语语言文化的另一个显著特征，即对书写价值的强烈矛盾心理。依赖书面语言被视为一种束缚，无法真正掌控语言内容。因此有了这句谚语：

This approach was very much a part of another distinctive feature of Sanskrit linguistic culture, namely a strong ambivalence about the value of writing. Reliance on language in its written form was seen as crippling, and not giving true control over linguistic content. Hence this proverb:

pustakasthā tu yā vidyā parahastagatam dhanam

书本上的知识——别人手里的金钱^。4

Knowledge in a book—money in another’s hand.⁴

古印度与许多其他文化一样，内部也存在着巨大的分歧，例如公元前^一世纪的 ^高卢德鲁伊教和现代危地马拉（玛雅人曾指出，外来者记录事物并非为了记忆，而是为了避免记忆）。苏格拉底也曾讲述过这样一个故事：当神托特最初将书写技艺传授给埃及^国王时，国王并不买账，认为“学习者缺乏记忆练习，反而会变得健忘”。印度学术的先驱们对此深有体会，他们非常重视书本学习的这一必然副作用。

In this ancient India was like many cultures as widely divided as the Druids of Gaul in the first century BC⁵ and modern Guatemala (where Mayans remark that outsiders note things down not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to have to remember them).⁶ Even Socrates recalled a story that when the the god Thoth first offered the craft of writing to the king of Egypt, the king was not impressed: ‘it will set forgetfulness in the minds of learners for lack of practice in memory’.⁷ The doyens of Indian learning took this undeniable side effect of book learning very much to heart.

尽管公元前五世纪该语言已经过完整的音韵学分析，甚至被纳入字母表的官方顺序，但人们仍然不赞成依赖书面文本来保存重要（尤其是具有宗教意义的）文献。因此，就有了另一句谚语：

Even though the language had undergone a full phonological analysis by the fifth century BC, which was even incorporated into the official order of letters in the alphabet, reliance on written texts for important (especially spiritually important) documents was decried. Hence another saying:

vedavikrayi açcāiva vedana cāiva dū aka

vedana lekhakaścāiva tevāi nirayagamina

vedavikrayiaçcāiva vedānācāiva dūaka

vedānā lekhakaścāiva tevāi nirayagāmina

贩卖吠陀经的人、误读吠陀经的人、

撰写吠陀经的人，都将走向地狱之路^。8

The sellers of the Vedas, the misreaders of the Vedas,

the writers of the Vedas, all go on the path to hell.⁸

相比之下，理想的做法是通过巧妙运用记忆技巧，将所有主要文本死记硬背下来。这种学习方式使得真正理解文本的各个方面成为可能，包括创作新的文本和评注，而这些内容确实可以从记录下来中获益。

By contrast the ideal was the rote learning of all the principal texts, through judicious use of mnemonic techniques. This learning then made possible true engagement with all aspects of them, including the composition of new texts and commentaries, which might indeed benefit from being written down.

这种语言的特点已在引文中有所体现。它是一种典型的古印欧语系语言，名词、形容词、代词和动词都具有高度屈折变化，其语法系统虽然可以进行精妙的分析（正如帕尼尼和语法传统所证明的那样），但也充满了特殊的例外。词汇往往是多音节的，而且由于该语言倾向于容纳几乎无限长的复合词，词长也常常增加。梵语的这一特点随着世纪和千年的流逝（在所有文学体裁中）变得越来越极端。

The character of the language that received this attention has already been exhibited in the quotations. It was a typical ancient Indo-European language, with nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs all highly inflected in a system that, although susceptible to elegant analysis (as Panini and the grammatical tradition demonstrated), was rife with special exceptions. Words tended to be polysyllabic, and their length was often increased by the propensity of the language to tolerate compounds of almost unlimited length, a feature of Sanskrit that became more extreme (in all genres of literature) as the centuries and millennia wore on.

梵语词汇浩瀚无垠：传统诗人词典（《阿玛拉科》，意为“不朽的宝库”，当然，它被编纂成经文以便背诵）中收录了超过一万个名词性（即非动词性）词根；如果将动词和复合词也算在内，莫尼尔·威廉姆斯1899年编纂的词典收录的词条更是高达18万条。^*这意味着近义词资源极其丰富：约翰·布鲁夫甚至声称，“莲花”一词就有五十个近义词，而“莲花”既是梵语诗歌中常用的概念，也具有字面意义和比喻意义。^9.词语往往具有多种含义：例如，最直接表示莲花的词“padma” ，在中性语中就有十一种含义（莲花状的装饰、莲花的形状、莲花的根部、大象脸部和鼻子上的彩色斑纹、军队阵型、万亿（^10⁶）、铅、密宗脉轮、身上的痣、斑点、柱子的一部分），在阳性语中又有八种含义（寺庙、四分之一象、蛇的种类、罗摩、俱毗罗的宝物、性爱方式、冥想姿势、与魔法相关的宝物）。梵语诗歌充分利用了这些词汇资源，大量运用典故和迂回的修辞手法，并热衷于双关语或文字游戏。

The vocabulary is vast: there are over ten thousand nominal (i.e. nonverbal) roots in the traditional thesaurus for poets (Amarakoa, ‘the Immortal Treasury’, organised of course into sutras for memorisation) and, when verbs and compounds are allowed in, Monier Williams’ 1899 dictionary runs to 180,000 entries.^* This means that there are vast resources in near-synonyms: at an extreme, John Brough claims there are fifty synonyms for ‘lotus’, a favourite concept of Sanskrit poetry in both literal and metaphorical senses.⁹ Words tend to have multiple senses anyway: the most straightforward word for lotus, padma has eleven extra senses in the neuter gender (lotus-like ornament, form of a lotus, root of a lotus, coloured marks on the face and trunk of an elephant, an army formation, a trillion (¹⁰), lead, a tantric chakra, a mole on the body, a spot, part of a column) and eight more in the masculine (temple, quarter-elephant, species of serpent, Rama, a treasure of Kubera, a mode of sexual enjoyment, a posture in meditation, a treasure connected with magic). These lexical resources are exploited to the full in Sanskrit poetry, which is gratuitously allusive and periphrastic, and addicted to ślea or punning.

但我们已经注意到，梵语的一个独特之处在于其复杂的连音系统，即所谓的“连音”（ sandhi ，意为“组合”）。这意味着词与词之间的界限常常模糊不清，一连串的音节，无论是发音还是书写，都可能存在多种解读。梵语的这两个特性结合起来，为双关语的运用提供了几乎难以想象的丰富可能性。文学创作充分利用了这一可能性。其中，诗人卡维拉贾（Kavirāja，意为“诗人国王”）将这种运用发挥到了极致。他在公元十二世纪创作的《罗摩衍那》（ Rāghavapā avīya ）中，以晦涩难懂（且极尽华丽）的诗句，同时重述了印度两大史诗《罗摩衍那》和《摩诃婆罗多》的故事。从某种意义上说，这可以被视为意义从文字表达中释放出来的一种方式，因为很难想象，如果没有听众对故事内容的积极而详尽的预先了解，这部作品无论从哪个层面都难以被理解。作者和听众共享故事，但他们的关注点完全集中在故事的语言细节上。这实际上不仅迫使人们使用含糊不清的词语，而且还要求在两部史诗的叙事结构之间建立一种类比。因此，引用其中一节（vi.8）：

But we have already noted that a special characteristic of Sanskrit is a complicated system of word liaison. This is known as sandhi (’putting together’). It means that word boundaries are often effaced, and a single stream of syllables, as pronounced or even written, becomes susceptible to multiple interpretations. The combined result of these two properties of Sanskrit is an opportunity for punning on an almost inconceivable scale. This opportunity was amply taken up in literary composition. The ultimate in this was achieved by the poet Kavirāja (’poet-king’), who in his Rāghavapāavīya (twelfth century AD), set himself the task of retelling simultaneously the stories of both the great epics of India, the Rāmāyaa and Mahābhārata, in ambiguous (and highly ornate) verses. In a way, this can be seen as a release of meaning from its expression in words, for it is difficult to conceive how the work could have been understood, in either of its senses, without active and detailed pre-knowledge by the audience of the tales being told. Author and audience share the stories, but are focused exclusively on the verbal details of their expression. This in practice forces not only the use of ambiguous terms, but an analogy to be set up between the narrative flow of the two epics. So, to quote one couplet (vi.8):

paracakra parikrāmann aśokagahana gata ：

k anād iva k tārtho 'bhūn maheyīdarśanena sa 。

paracakra parikrāmann aśokagahana gata:

kanād iva ktārtho ‘bhūn maheyīdarśanena sa.

他绕着敌国的领土/军队行进，来到一片阿育王树丛中/悲伤的反面：

Going round the enemy’s kingdom/forces, he came to a thicket of Aśoka trees/the reverse of grief:

仿佛就在一瞬间，他的任务就完成了，因为他看到了大地之女/母牛。

in an instant as it were, his task was accomplished, by his sight of the daughter of the earth/the cows.

这里，第一个译文（粗体）适用于哈努曼寻找悉多的情节，第二个译文（斜体）适用于阿朱那深入敌后偷牛的情节。但为了保持叙述的连贯性，大多数短语仍然有明确的译文。

Here the first of the variant translations (in bold) of phrases applies to Hanuman seeking Sita, and the second (italicised) to Arjuna on a cattle-rustling expedition behind enemy lines. But to maintain a coherent narrative, most of the phrases still have an unambiguous translation.

因此，从各个方面来看，梵语都是一种华丽的语言。印度首席大法官、皇家亚洲学会创始人威廉·琼斯爵士在1786年曾对其进行过一段令人难忘的描述：“梵语，无论其历史多么悠久，都拥有精妙的结构；它比希腊语更完美，比拉丁语更丰富，也比两者都更精致。”

In every sense of the word, then, Sanskrit is a luxuriant language. Sir William Jones, Chief Justice of India and founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, memorably described it in 1786: ‘The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.’

印度生活中的梵语

Sanskrit in Indian life

社会的

SOCIAL

关于谁或什么为梵语提供了最佳范本的问题，在其漫长的发展历程中，人们给出了各种各样的答案。这个问题远比希腊语或拉丁语的标准问题复杂得多，因为希腊语和拉丁语不像梵语那样带有浓厚的宗教色彩。

The question of who or what provided the model for the best Sanskrit has been answered in various ways over its long life. It was far more fraught than the question of the standard for Greek or Latin, since those languages did not carry the heavy theological overtones that have remained with Sanskrit throughout.

正如我们所见，最初，重点纯粹是宗教性的，其推广的目标是正确地发音和诵读吠陀经。如今被视为社会和虔诚礼仪的事情，在古印度却有着截然不同的解读。毕竟，吟诵吠陀经被认为能赋予超自然的力量，帕坦伽利举了一个语法错误可能危及生命的例子：恶魔弗栗多举行祭祀，想要得到一个儿子，成为因陀罗沙特鲁（indra-śatru），即杀死他众神宿敌因陀罗的英雄。不幸的是，他把重音放在了第一个音节而不是最后一个音节上，结果却得到了一个会被因陀罗杀死的儿子。 ¹⁰

Originally, as we have seen, the focus was purely religious, and the promoted aim was to pronounce and articulate the Vedas properly. What would now be seen as a matter of social and pious propriety was represented otherwise in ancient India. Intoning the Vedas, after all, was held to give supernatural power, and Patanjali gave an example of the potentially life-threatening nature of bad grammar: the demon Vritra performed a sacrifice to obtain a son who would be indra-śatru, a killer of Indra, his sworn enemy among the gods. Unfortunately he accented it wrong, on the first rather than the last syllable, and so conjured up a son whom Indra would kill.¹⁰

这段出自帕坦伽利的轶事，讲述的是公元前二世纪的故事，表明至少帕尼尼语法所定义的语言特征中，某些方面已经不再是常规用法。帕尼尼生活在公元五世纪，位于梵语或普拉克利特语地区的西北部极地。到了帕坦伽利时代，这一地区已被非印度教徒（也不讲梵语）的外来民族——^来自西部和北部的雅瓦那人（希腊人）和萨卡人（斯基泰人，讲一种类似于普什图语的伊朗语）——所控制。

Coming from Patanjali, this is an anecdote of the second century BC, showing that some features at least of the language defined by Panini’s grammar had already ceased to be routine. Panini had lived in the fifth century in the extreme north-west of the Sanskrit- or Prakrit-speaking area. By Patanjali’s time, this region had fallen under the control of mleccha^* peoples, non-Hindu (and non-Sanskrit-speaking) foreigners, the Yavana (Greeks) and Śaka (Scythians speaking an Iranian language, comparable to Pashto) from the west and north.

帕坦伽利强调的确保梵语正确性的宗教动机，在印度等级森严的神权社会中自然而然地演变为社会标志，乃至身份象征。帕坦伽利担心，他自然而然地希望将最佳的（受过良好教育的）用法与语法规定等同起来，这其中可能存在循环论证（ itara -itara-āśraya ）：毕竟，语法学家又如何知道该规定什么呢？因此，他诉诸于地理意义上的雅利安人居住地（ Āryāvarta ）的用法：这指的是北印度，北至喜马拉雅山脉，南至文迪亚山脉，西至旁遮普邦，东至阿拉哈巴德。¹¹这便成了人们普遍接受的雅利安中心概念，尽管在大约七百年后，即公元500年左右成书的《摩奴法典》中，这一概念有所完善：中土（Madhyadeśa）——实际上就是今天的哈里亚纳邦和北方邦——与此定义相符；而雅利安人聚居地（Āryāvarta ）的范围扩大到涵盖次大陆北部；与此同时，德里周围的一小片区域（“位于神圣的萨拉斯瓦蒂河和达德瓦蒂河之间”），被称为婆罗门聚居地（Brahmāvarta），享有至高无上的赞誉：“世间所有的人都应向出生于此地的婆罗门学习正确的行为举止。” ¹²

The religious motives emphasised by Patanjali for ensuring one’s Sanskrit was correct developed naturally, in India’s hierarchical and theocratic society, into social markers, and indeed status symbols. Patanjali worries that there may be a circularity (itara-itara-āśraya) in his natural wish to identify the best educated (śia) usage with what grammar prescribes: after all, how does the grammarian know what to prescribe? So he appeals to the usage of the Āryāvarta, defined geographically: this turns out to be northern India, bounded by the Himalayas in the north and the Vindhya mountains in the south, and the Panjab in the west and Allahabad in the east.¹¹ This was to remain the received view of the Aryan centre, although there are refinements to be found in the Manu Law Code, written perhaps seven hundred years later, about AD 500: Madhyadeśa (’Mid Land’) is identified with this definition— effectively modern Haryana and Uttar Pradesh—while the Āryāvarta has expanded to encompass the whole of the north of the subcontinent; meanwhile, a small region round Delhi (’between the divine rivers Sarasvatī and Dadvatī’), identified as the Brahmāvarta, has the supreme accolade: ‘All men in the world should learn their proper behaviour from a Brahman born in that country.’¹²

政治的

POLITICAL

帕坦伽利巧妙地将雅利安人的疆界大致划定在他所属的巽伽王朝的边界。 ¹³然而，在一个世纪前，这种做法就不那么方便了，因为当时的政治中心是幅员辽阔但地理位置远不如雅利安人集中的孔雀王朝。孔雀王朝的中心是帕利普特拉（今巴特那），位于印度东部，超出了当时雅利安人的疆界。此外，孔雀王朝的疆域东至布拉马普特拉河，北至阿富汗南部，南至今天的迈索尔和尼尔吉里山脉。这些疆界由孔雀王朝最伟大的君主阿育王（意为“无忧无虑”，或者如他自称的“皮亚达西”，梵语为Priyadarśin，意为“面容友善”）所立，或立于石柱之上，或镌刻于岩石之上。

Patanjali conveniently places the limits of Āryāvarta more or less at the borders of the Śunga empire of which he was a citizen.¹³ This would not have been so convenient a century earlier, when the political world revolved around the vastly larger, but less centrally located, empire of the Mauryas. Its centre was Pāaliputra (modern Patna), which is in eastern India beyond the confines of the then Āryāvarta. Furthermore, it extended as far to the east as the Brahmaputra, as far to the north and west as the southern part of Afghanistan, and to the south it reached modern Mysore and the Nilgiri hills. These bounds are marked by monumental inscriptions, set up on pillars or carved into the living rock, placed by the greatest Maurya emperor Aśoka (’grief-less’—or, as he preferred to called himself, Piyadasi, Sanskrit Priyadarśin, ‘of friendly aspect’.)

政治在梵语早期于印度传播过程中所扮演的角色至今仍不甚明了。很可能，公元前三世纪的军事征服和王朝统治进程传播的并非梵语本身，而是摩揭陀俗语（即孔雀王朝宫廷的语言）。此后，梵语逐渐确立了其地位，并无疑在印度乃至其他地区确立了自身作为所有在日常生活中使用某种印度俗语的人们进行受过教育的通用语言的地位。自此以后，梵语在印度一直保持着这一地位。尽管在过去的一千年里，其他语言，特别是波斯语（在莫卧儿王朝统治下）和英语（在英国统治下），也进入了次大陆，并与梵语争夺教育领域的主要语言地位。

The role of politics in the early spread of Sanskrit across India remains obscure. Very likely, the process of military conquest and dynastic subordination in the third century BC spread not Sanskrit as such but the Magadhi Prakrit, which was the language of the Maurya court; Sanskrit would have taken up its position thereafter, establishing itself here, and no doubt elsewhere, as the common language for educated discourse of all those who spoke some Indian Prakrit in day-to-day life. This has been its position in India ever since, although in the last millennium other languages, notably Persian (under the Mughals) and English (under the British), have entered the subcontinent and competed for this status as the prime language of education.

事实上，通过军事征服实现的语言进步似乎特别短暂。在现代卡纳塔克邦和安得拉邦交界处的赖丘尔附近，散布着阿育王的一系列敕令；但如今这里却是卡纳达语和泰卢固语的中心地带——这两种语言都属于达罗毗荼语系，与摩揭陀语，甚至梵语都毫无关联。后来，一系列以恒河下游为基地的雅利安语系帝国（例如阿育王的帝国）兴衰更替：这种情况发生在公元前二世纪、公元二世纪和五世纪；每次帝国衰落后，以恒河下游为中心的比哈尔地区都会重新使用（同样与摩揭陀语无关的）蒙达语。印度东部和中部似乎只是逐渐地、断断续续地接受了雅利安语的影响：孟加拉地区在公元四世纪，奥里萨地区在公元七世纪。更往西，即使到了十四世纪，摩诃罗罗（意为“伟大的王国”）的官方铭文仍然使用卡纳达语；但后来那里变成了另一个完全使用雅利安语的地区，其语言被称为马拉地语。^*看来，社会各阶层在一段时间内肯定使用过不同的语言，而且（至少在这种情况下）雅利安语更受下层阶级的青睐。

In fact, the kind of linguistic advance achieved by military conquest seems to have been particularly impermanent. There is a cluster of Aśoka’s edicts round Raichur, on the borders of modem Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh; but this is now the very heart of the area where Kannada and Telugu are spoken—both Dravidian languages unrelated to Magadhi, or indeed to Sanskrit. Later, a series of Aryan-speaking empires based on the lower Ganges (such as Aśoka’s) rose and fell: this happened in the second century BC, and the second and fifth centuries AD; after each fall Bihar, the area centred on the lower Ganges, relapsed into the (likewise unrelated) Munda language. It seems that the east and centre of India succumbed to the Aryan tendency only gradually, and fitfully: Bengal in the fourth century AD, Orissa in the seventh. Farther to the west, even in the fourteenth century, the official inscriptions of Mahārāra (’great kingdom’) were still in Kannada; but it then became another totally Aryan-speaking area, with a language known as Marathi.^* It appears that the social strata must have been speaking different languages for some time, with (in this case, at least) Aryan favoured much more by the lower orders.

阿育王的铭文是现存最早的可辨识雅利安语铭文，但并非用梵语，而是用摩揭陀俗语写成。这种铭文中梵语的缺失，或者更确切地说，梵语仅作为文学装饰，而信息的核心内容则用俗语表达，这种情况持续了数个世纪。直到两百年后，人们才在更西边的阿约提亚和马图拉（德里以南）发现了第一批梵语铭文。这些铭文中梵语和俗语的功能分工清晰可见：梵语用于诗歌，俗语用于散文题词。最终，梵语占据了主导地位，并成为铭文的唯一语言。但这一传统直到 250 年后才完全确立，始于公元 150 年，当时一位名不见经传的国王鲁德拉达曼在古吉拉特邦西海岸的朱纳加（意为“希腊堡垒”）留下了岩石铭文。

Aśoka’s inscriptions, the earliest in a decipherably Aryan language to survive, are not in Sanskrit but Magadhi Prakrit; and this absence of Sanskrit from inscriptions, or rather its presence only for literary decoration while the guts of the message are given in Prakrit, continues for several centuries. It is not until two hundred years later that the first inscriptions in Sanskrit are found, farther west, in Ayodhya and Mathura (south of Delhi). There is a clear division of function between Sanskrit and Prakrit visible in these inscriptions, which contain both: Sanskrit is used for the verse, Prakrit for the prose dedications. Ultimately, Sanskrit did come to predominate, and indeed to be the exclusive language of inscriptions. But this tradition did not get fully established for another 250 years, starting in AD 150 with the rock inscriptions of a fairly minor king, Rudradāman, at Junāgah (’Greek fort’) on the western coast, in Gujarat.

梵语用于高雅场合，而俗语用于日常场合，这种功能上的分工也体现在梵语戏剧的语言惯例中。每部戏剧都是多语种或多方言的。从公元六世纪起，贵族男性使用梵语；女性使用沙乌拉塞尼语（马图拉俗语），但用摩诃罗利语演唱；而平民角色则使用摩揭陀语（讽刺的是，摩揭陀语正是九百年前带有皇家色彩的方言的后裔）。我们只能推测，期间发生的政治变迁（例如公元前和公元初期马哈拉施特拉地区萨塔瓦哈纳王朝的崛起）或多或少地对人们感知到的方言地位产生了永久性的影响。^*

Something of the same division of function between Sanskrit for high and Prakrit for everyday use is also shown by the language conventions of Sanskrit drama. Every play was multilingual, or multi-dialectal. From the sixth century AD, noble males speak in Sanskrit; ladies speak in Śaurasenī (the Mathura Prakrit), but sing in Mahārārī; meanwhile, low characters are scripted in Magadhi (ironically, the descendant of the dialect that had had royal overtones, nine hundred years before). We can only suppose that intervening political reversals (e.g. the rise of the Sātavāhana kings in the Maharashtra area over the first centuries BC and AD) had a more or less permanent effect on the perceived status of the dialects.^*

公元900年左右，拉贾谢卡拉（Rājaśekhara ）在为理想诗人提出建议时说，诗人应该拥有精通阿帕布拉沙语（Apabhra śa，意为“衰落”，是当时常用的贬义词，指逐渐演变为现代印地语的绍拉塞尼普拉克里特语的后期形式）的仆人，以及精通摩揭陀语的女仆等等；但他的妻子应该说梵语，或者说“普拉克里特语”（在他看来，普拉克里特语指的是马哈拉施特拉语），而他的朋友则应该精通各种语言。 ¹⁴尽管诗人本人对当地的普拉克里特语充满热情，但梵语的社会地位已变得不可避免。然而，在很大程度上，方言的地位似乎已经完全脱离了人们对其地方起源或历史的认知。

Rājaśekhara, making recommendations C.AD 900 for the ideal poet, says that he should have servants fluent in Apabhraśa (’falling off, the quite generally used, but unflattering, term for later forms of Śauraseni Prakrit, on its way to becoming modern Hindi), maids in Magadhi and the like; but his wives should speak Sanskrit, or else ‘Prakrit’, which for him means Maharashtri, and his friends all languages.¹⁴ The social imperative for Sanskrit had become inescapable, despite the poet’s own personal enthusiasm for his local Prakrit. But to a large extent, the status of the dialects seemed to have become fully detached from awareness of their local origins, or their history.

宗教

RELIGIOUS

有趣的是，摩揭陀语很可能也是佛教创始人乔达摩·悉达多（释迦牟尼）的方言，尽管比他早了大约一千年。（他的同时代人，耆那教创始人摩诃毗罗也居住在这一地区。）摩揭陀也是最早的佛教结集举办地，这些结集为后世奠定了佛教的基调。而佛教最著名、最具影响力的早期皈依者正是阿育王本人，他也是摩揭陀的居民，居住在摩揭陀的首府波利普特拉（今比哈尔邦恒河畔的巴特那）。

Interestingly, Magadhi had probably also been the dialect of Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, though about one millennium earlier. (His contemporary, Mahāvīra, the founder of Jainism, lived in the area too.) Magadha was also the area of the earliest Buddhist councils, which established the outlines of this faith for later generations. And Buddhism’s most famous, and influential, early convert was King Aśoka himself, another resident of Magadha, in its chief city, Pāaliputra (modern Patna in the state of Bihar on the Ganges).

这种地理上的巧合或许会促使佛教偏爱摩揭陀。佛陀曾劝诫僧侣们用本民族语言（梵语：sakayā niruttiya）弘法。他的观点似乎不仅包含对本民族语言的尊重，更包含一种积极的信念，即他所属的种姓——武士种姓卡特里耶（ Katriya）——实际上优于与梵语相关的祭司种姓梵天（Brāhma）。这是他对整个种姓制度以及真正“雅利安人”（ ariya）——尽管在佛教英语中通常被译为“高贵的”——的重新定义的一部分，其依据是个人功德而非出身。

This geographical coincidence might have been expected to lead Buddhism to favour Magadhi. The Buddha had advised his monks to teach in their own language (sakayā niruttiyā). His view here seems to have involved not only a respect for the vernacular, but also a positive belief that his caste, the warrior Katriya, was actually superior to the priestly Brāhmaa with its Sanskrit associations. This was part of his persuasive redefinition of the whole caste system and of what it was to be truly ariya (Aryan)—though this word is usually translated in Buddhist English as ‘noble’—based on personal merit rather than birth.

但僧侣们并没有因此而偏袒佛陀本人及其所在地区的通用语言。相反，他们宣称支持任何形式的方言。有传言说，这引起了婆罗门僧侣的一些不安，他们担心由此产生的语法和发音上的松散会歪曲佛陀的教诲。然而，随着时间的推移，一种特定的俗语（Prakrit）逐渐占据主导地位：它被称为巴利语（意为“经典”），是一种混合的俗语。尽管佛教传统声称（这种语言曾是佛陀所使用的，并且是所有众生的原始语言，即“sabbasattāna mūlabhāsa”），^*巴利语并非以摩揭陀语为主，而是包含许多独特的西方元素，让人联想到绍拉塞尼语：它很可能是僧侣们使用不同俗语进行妥协后，作为一种佛教雅利安语混合语而产生的。

But the monks did not in turn privilege the common speech of the Buddha himself and his region. Rather, they declared themselves in favour of any form of vernacular language. There are stories that this caused some unease among Brahman monks, who feared that the resulting slack grammar and pronunciation would corrupt the sayings of the Buddha. However, in time a particular Prakrit did come to predominate: it was called Pāli (’canonical’) and was a mixed Prakrit. Despite the claims of the Buddhist tradition (which also claimed that this language had been spoken by the Buddha and was, for good measure, the original language of all beings, sabbasattāna mūlabhāsa),^* Pali was not predominantly Magadhi, but included many distinctively Western elements, reminiscent of Śauraseni: it must have arisen as a kind of Buddhist Aryan creole, by a process of compromise among monks speaking various Prakrits.

后来，随着信仰的发展和制度化的加深，佛教逐渐采用一种更为宏大的语言风格，其形式更接近古典梵语，被称为佛教混合梵语。这种语言风格通常是将普拉克利特语（Prakrit）的语法结构（比梵语更简单、更具分析性）重新包装，赋予词语以类似古典梵语的格标记和动词词尾，但这些标记和词尾往往不符合古典语法的规范。

Later on, as the faith developed, and became more heavily institutionalised, it increasingly adopted a grander style of language, in form closer to classical Sanskrit, which is known as Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. This typically involves taking the grammatical structures of Prakrit, which are much simpler and more analytic than those of Sanskrit, and reclothing the words in case markings and verb endings that are reminiscent of classical Sanskrit, but quite often misapplied from the viewpoint of classical grammar.

总体而言，纵观印度语言史，梵语的地位呈上升趋势，无论是在世俗领域还是宗教领域；孔雀王朝君主、佛教徒和耆那教徒早期对白话文的偏爱，最终都让位于梵语所受到的尊重。梵语一直被认为是一种人造语言（梵语：sa sk ta），但这反而提升了它的地位，其使用也逐渐被视为衡量文本质量的语言学试金石。

Overall, throughout Indian linguistic history, Sanskrit’s status has tended to rise, both in secular and sacred use; the Maurya kings’, and the Buddhists’ and Jains’, early preference for the vernacular all ultimately yielded to the respect in which Sanskrit was held. It has been recognised throughout as an artificial (saskta) language; but if anything this has increased its status, and its use has come to be seen as a linguistic touchstone for the quality of a text.

局外人的观点

Outsiders’ views

简要比较一下外界对梵语及其社会作用的看法，是一件很有趣的事情。有两个外来民族留下了他们与梵语接触的记录：公元前最后三个世纪，我们有来自希腊人的记载；公元第一个千年中期，我们有来自东北中国的相关记载。

It is interesting to compare briefly some external perceptions of Sanskrit, and of its role in society. There are two outsiders’ traditions which have left records of their encounters: for the last three centuries BC, we have reports from the Greeks; and for the middle of the first millennium AD, from the Chinese to the north-east.

从地图上可以看出，在陆路旅行靠步行的时代，这两个文明的使者在到达印度文化中心之前，就必须展现出非凡的决心：希腊远在 5000 英里之外（尽管希腊语在大部分距离上都已成为通用语），而中国虽然直线距离更近，但实际上不仅被塔克拉玛干沙漠隔绝，还被从帕米尔高原延伸到遥远喜马拉雅山脉的群山阻隔。

A glance at the map shows that, in an age of overland travel on foot, emissaries of both civilisations must have had to distinguish themselves in terms of determination even before they could reach the centres of Indian culture: Greece was over 5000 miles away (though Greek had been established as a lingua franca for most of that distance), while China, though closer as the crow flies, was in practice cut off not only by the Taklamakan desert but also by the mountains stretching from the Pamirs to the far Himalayas.

希腊人

THE GREEKS

公元前327年，亚历山大的远征将希腊人带到印度边境之前，希腊人对印度知之甚少。此后，北方一些伟大的印度统治者与控制着波斯帝国东部地区的希腊王朝——塞琉古王朝——之间展开了外交交流。公元前302年至288年，麦加斯梯尼担任塞琉古王朝驻印度大使，前往位于华氏城（巴特那）的旃陀罗笈多·孔雀王处，并将此地介绍给希腊世界，称其为帕利博特拉。他留下了一部论述印度风俗的著作《印度志》（ Indikā），这部著作与奥尼西克里图斯和尼阿库斯（两位曾随亚历山大征战的海军军官）的回忆录一起，构成了希腊人了解印度的核心，直至古代世界末期。

The Greeks knew little about India until Alexander’s campaigns brought them to its borders in 327 BC. Thereafter there were diplomatic exchanges between some of the great Indian rulers of the north and the Greek dynasts who controlled the east of what had been the Persian empire, the Seleucids. From 302 to 288 Megasthenes served as Seleucid ambassador to King Chandragupta Maurya in Pataliputra (Patna), which he introduced to the Greek world as Palibothra. He left a discursive study of Indian ways, the Indikā, which, taken together with some reports of Onesicritus and Nearchus, naval officers who had written memoirs of their service with Alexander, stood as the core of Greek knowledge of India until the end of the ancient world.

《印度志》已失传，但可以从其他作者（如斯特拉波和普林尼，他们两百年后在意大利写作）的大量引文中大致重构其内容。该书几乎没有涉及印度的政治或文学方面，但确实分析了种姓制度，指出了至少七个不同的“部落”或“世系”，这些部落或世系可以相当准确地对应到由来已久的四分制：婆罗门（祭司和哲学家）、刹帝利（国王和武士）、吠舍（商人）和首陀罗（劳动者）。该书似乎也提到了湿婆和克里希纳崇拜的盛行，但这种推断是间接的：它沿袭了希腊罗马的惯用手法，只列出了作者认为与印度神祇对应的希腊神祇的名字。据说印度人崇拜赫拉克勒斯（因为他像克里希纳一样手持棍棒），以及狄俄尼索斯（因为他像湿婆一样与繁茂的植物和须弥山有关，而狄俄尼索斯是从宙斯的大腿（希腊语为mērou ）中诞生的，他是一个相当狂野的人物，人们用音乐和舞蹈来崇拜他）。

The Indikā has not survived, but can be reconstructed substantially from the extensive quotations that figure in other authors, such as Strabo and Pliny, writing (in Italy) two centuries later. It contains little or nothing on the political or literary aspects of Indian life, but does contain an analysis of the caste system, identifying no fewer than seven distinct ‘tribes’ or ‘lineages’, which can be fairly well mapped on to the time-honoured four-way division into Brahmans (priests and philosophers), Kshatriyas (kings and warriors), Vaiśyas (merchants) and Śudras (labourers). It also appears to note the prevalence of the cults of Śiva and Krishna, but the inference is indirect: in the usual Graeco-Roman way, it gives only the names of Greek gods which the author had identified with the Indian figures; so the Indians are said to have worshipped Heracles (since like Krishna he carried a club), and Dionysus (since like Śiva he was associated with thriving vegetable life and with Mount Meru, whereas Dionysus had been born from Zeus’s thigh, in Greek mērou, and he was a pretty wild character, worshipped with music and dance).

麦加斯梯尼对当时孔雀王朝宗教的理性层面进行了更为明确的论述，他将婆罗门（梵语：brakhmanai 或 bragmanai）和沙门（梵语：sarmanai）区分为不同^类型的哲学家。沙门（梵语：sarmanai ）的确是一个梵语词，有时特指佛教僧侣，但麦加斯梯尼的著作中并没有明确提及佛教。当时佛教已有约两百年的历史（它起源于麦加斯梯尼居住的同一地区）。

Megasthenes does cope more explicitly with the more intellectual aspects of religions practised in the Maurya empire of his time, distinguishing Brahmans (brak^hmanai or bragmanai) and Śramans (sarmanai) as different kinds of philosophers. Śramaa is indeed a Sanskrit word sometimes used specifically for Buddhist monks, but there is no explicit mention of Buddhism, which would have been some two hundred years old at the time (having been founded in exactly the same region where Megasthenes was resident).

这段评注往往停留在相当肤浅的层面，例如提到了裸体圣贤（gumnosophístai ）的存在，以及男女学生在沙门门下地位平等。麦加斯梯尼显然从未理解婆罗门实际上是他所区分的“部落”（即种姓）之一；也从未理解“森林居民”（他的主人称之为梵行者）并非沙门的一种，而是达到一定人生阶段的人，无论他们是婆罗门还是沙门。

The commentary tends to be focused at a fairly superficial level, for example the presence of gumnosophístai, or naked sages, and the fact that male and female students were on a par as disciples to the Śramans. Megasthenes apparently never understood that the Brahmans are in fact one of the ‘tribes’, i.e. castes, that he had distinguished; nor that ‘forest-dwellers’ (what his hosts would have called vanaprastha) are not a species of Śraman, but rather those who have reached a certain period of life, whether Brahman or Śraman.

印度一直是希腊人乃至罗马人获取异域珍品的绝佳来源地。事实上，他们所吸收的梵语知识中最真实的部分，便是他们一些最喜爱物品的名称：帆布（希腊语karpasos，意为“棉花”，源自karpāsa）、生姜（希腊语zingiber ，源自śngavera ，以恒河畔的一个城镇命名）、胡椒（希腊语peperi ，源自pippali，意为“浆果”）、糖（希腊语sakkharon，源自śarkarā，意为“砂砾”）——最初，亚历山大的海军上将尼阿库斯将其描述为无需蜜蜂帮助，从芦苇中采集的蜂蜜。 ¹⁵

India remained the fabulous source of exotic products for the Greeks and beyond them the Romans. In fact, the truest elements of Sanskrit lore that they ever absorbed were the names of some of their favourite substances: canvas (Greek karpasos, ‘cotton’, from karpāsa), ginger (Greek zingiber from śngavera, named after a town on the Ganges), pepper (Greek peperi from pippali, ‘berry’), sugar (Greek sakkharon from śarkarā, ‘grit’)— originally characterised by Alexander’s admiral Nearchus as honey coming from reeds without the aid of bees.¹⁵

麦加斯梯尼的著作构成了文艺复兴时期之前欧洲对印度的认知，但在某些方面却缺乏理解，从未对哲学、语言或文学进行过任何鉴赏。例如，一位智者曾戏言，由于对话是通过三位翻译进行的，他们想要真正理解所阐述的哲学思想，就如同用泥浆净化水一样徒劳无功。 ¹⁶

Megasthenes’ work, which came to form Europe’s knowledge of India up until the Renaissance, was in some ways lacking in understanding, and never offered any appreciation of philosophy, language or literature. In one case, a sage joked that since the conversation took place through three interpreters, they were as likely to get a clear idea of the philosophy being expounded as to purify water by running it through mud.¹⁶

但这并不意味着居住在附近的希腊人就同样缺乏这方面的知识。事实上，旁遮普的一位希腊国王米南德（公元前二世纪）就因其对佛教的浓厚兴趣而名垂青史，这体现在他所著的巴利文经典《弥兰陀王问经》（Milinda-pañha）中：“他精通诸多技艺和科学——神圣的传统和世俗的法律；数论、瑜伽、正理和胜论等哲学体系；算术、音乐；医学；四部吠陀经、往世书和史诗；天文学、魔法、因果关系和咒语；战争艺术；诗歌；以及财产转让——总之，他精通全部十九门技艺。” ¹⁷

But this did not mean that the Greeks who lived closer in were similarly lacking. One Greek king of the Panjab, Menander (second century BC), in fact became immortalised for his penetrating interest in Buddhism in the form of the Pali classic Milinda-pañha, or ‘Questions of King Milinda’: ‘Many were the arts and sciences he knew—holy tradition and secular law; the Sākhya, Yoga, Nyāya and Vaiśeika systems of philosophy; arithmetic, music; medicine; the four Vedas, the Purānas and the Itihāsas; astronomy, magic, causation and spells; the art of war; poetry; and property-conveyancing—in a word, the full nineteen.’¹⁷

同时期的另一位印度-希腊人，自称赫利奥多罗斯，是安提阿尔基达斯国王派往印度的希腊使节（yonadūta），在中央邦贝斯纳加尔的一根至今仍屹立的石柱上，用纯正的普拉克利特语留下了一段铭文。铭文以一句精神箴言结尾：

And another Indo-Greek of the same period, announcing himself as Heliodorus, Greek ambassador (yonadūta) from King Antialkidas, left an inscription in perfect Prakrit on a column still standing at Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh. It ends with the spiritual precept:

trīni amutapādāni...suanu hitāni

neya ti svagam dame cāga apramada

trīni amutapādāni...suanuhitāni

neyati svagam dame cāga apramāda

通往永生的三个步骤，如果正确遵循，

就能进入天堂：自律、慷慨、专注。

Three steps to immortality, when correctly followed,

lead to heaven: control, generosity, attention.

中国人

THE CHINESE

与主要以商人、征服者或权力代表身份来到印度的希腊作家不同，中国人是以认真学习印度文化，尤其是佛教的学者身份而来：一些人显然在印度期间深入学习了梵语（以及巴利语和摩揭陀语）。因此，他们的描述具有远超希腊文献的权威性和洞察力；在许多情况下，他们的描述为我们了解当时印度生活细节提供了最佳证据，因为印度人自己一向不太热衷于记录自己的日常生活。

By contrast with Greek writers, who were in India largely as traders, conquerors or representatives of power, the Chinese came as serious students of India’s culture, and particularly Buddhism: some evidently learnt Sanskrit (with Pali and Magadhi Prakrit) in depth during their stay. Their descriptions, therefore, have an authority and penetration that far exceed the Greek testimony; in many cases, they provide the best evidence we have for the details of Indian life at this time, the Indians themselves having always been remarkably unconcerned to set down straightforward descriptions of their own daily life.

这段中国证词来自四位寻求正统佛教经典的朝圣者，他们大多跋涉穿越塔克拉玛干沙漠，翻越兴都库什山脉，经由这条北方路线进入印度。他们大约每隔一个世纪才来一次。每人除了带回大量佛教手稿并着手翻译外，还在返回中国后撰写了回忆录。

The Chinese testimony comes from four pilgrims in search of authentic Buddhist scriptures, most of whom struggled past the Taklamakan desert and across the Hindu Kush to enter India through this northern route. They came at intervals of about a century. Each of them, besides bringing home quantities of Buddhist manuscripts which they then set about translating, went on to write a memoir after their return to China.

法显（法显）是第一位有记载的法显，他于公元400年至414年间经兴都库什山脉前往印度，之后乘船返回。在这期间，他有三年时间待在华氏城（巴特那），“学习梵文书籍^*，学习梵文对话，并抄写戒律”。 ¹⁸（他的同伴多正深受印度沙门僧侣的清修生活所感动，决定不再回国。）之后，法显沿恒河而下，来到另一座主要城市占婆（今巴格尔布尔附近），在那里又待了两年，主要目的是搜集佛经。 ¹⁹ 随后，他经由“叶波提”（Ye-po-ti）或雅瓦德维帕（爪哇岛）返回故乡，这段旅程可谓波澜壮阔。他自述在印度中部共居住了六年。 ²⁰

Fa-Xian (), the first whose tale has survived, travelled to India via the Hindu Kush from AD 400 to 414, returning by sea. For three of these years he was at Pataliputra, ‘learning to read the books in Sanskrit^* and to converse in that language, and in copying the precepts’.¹⁸ (His comrade Do-Zhing was so impressed with the holy life of the Indian śramanas that he decided not to go home.) Fa-Xian then moved down the Ganges to another major city, Champa (near modern Bhagalpur), where he spent two more years, principally seeking to acquire Buddhist texts,¹⁹ before an extremely eventful voyage home via ‘Ye-po-ti’ or Yava-dvīpa (Java). He says he had resided in central India for six years in all.²⁰

公元518年，宋云（）来到这里。他只深入到开伯尔山口两端的那伽罗哈拉（贾拉拉巴德）和普鲁阿普拉（白沙瓦），开伯尔山口现在连接阿富汗和巴基斯坦；三年后，他沿原路返回中国。

In 518 Song-Yun () came. He penetrated no farther than Nagarahāra (Jalalabad) and Puruapūra (Peshawar), at either end of the Khyber pass, which now links Afghanistan and Pakistan; and returned to China by the same route after three years.

然后，在公元 629 年，他们中最著名的玄奘（）偷偷摸摸地来到印度（当时中国边境关闭），经过三年的旅程，他在那里待了十年，主要是在巴特那城外的那烂陀大学学习，但也游历了次大陆南部的大部分地区。

Then, in 629, the most famous of them all, Xuan-Zang (), reached India by stealth (the Chinese border being closed at the time), and after a three-year journey stayed for ten years, mostly as a student at Nālandā university outside Pataliputra, but also undertaking a journey around most of the south of the subcontinent.

玄奘之后，大约一代人，即公元671年，一位名叫易经的僧人来到佛法之都。易经从广州乘船而来，途中在苏门答腊南部的印度化王国室利佛逝（今巨港）停留两年，学习梵文。（他写道：“若有中国僧人欲西游求知，应先在佛逝（室利佛逝）修行一两年，修习戒律，之后再前往印度中部。”）之后，他前往那烂陀大学学习十年。毕业后，他乘船返回室利佛逝，直至公元695年，大部分时间都居住在那里，组织将佛教经典从梵文翻译成中文，并撰写了两部回忆录：《西游僧人》和《南海传法》。²¹

Xuan-Zang was followed, a generation later, in 671, by a pilgrim called Yi-Jing (), Yi-Jing travelled by sea from Canton, but he stopped at the Indianised kingdom of Śrī Vijaya (Palembang) in southern Sumatra for two years of Sanskrit study. (He wrote: ‘if a Chinese priest wishes to go to the west to understand and read there, he would be wise to spend a year or two in Fo-Shi [Vijaya], and practise the proper rules there; he might then go on to central India.’) He himself then proceeded to the university of Nalanda, where he studied for ten years. Afterwards, he returned by sea to Śrī Vijaya, where he spent most of his time until 695, organising the translation of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese, and writing two memoirs: On eminent monks who sought the law in the West, and On the spiritual law, sent from the Southern Seas.²¹

对他们而言，印度是佛教觉悟的发源地。但它本身也是一个充满魅力的国度。他们对印度的记述大多是游记，但玄奘尤其详细地描述了他在印度期间所接触到的以及他所参与的学术生活。他写道：

India for them was the home of Buddhist enlightenment. But it was also a fascinating country in its own right. Their accounts of their time there are very largely taken up with travelogue, but Xuan-Zang is particularly detailed about the intellectual life he encountered, and to which he contributed, during his stay. He wrote:

他们的字母表由梵天（Brahmādeva）编纂，其形式自古至今一直传承。字母共有四十七个，根据宾语和语境（例如时态和方位格）组合成词；此外还有其他形式（例如词形变化）。这套字母表根据不同情况向四面八方传播，形成了不同的分支；因此，词语的发音（例如口语）略有变化；但其主要特征并未改变。印度中部地区完整地保留了语言的原始特征。这里的发音柔和悦耳，如同天神（Devas）的语言^。词语的发音清晰纯正，堪称所有人的典范。边境地区的人们已经养成了一些错误的发音习惯；因为人们放荡的习惯决定了他们语言的腐败程度^。22

The letters of their alphabet were arranged by Brahmādeva, and their forms have been handed down from the first till now. They are forty-seven in number, and are combined so as to form words according to the object, and according to the circumstances [viz. tenses, and local cases]: there are other forms [viz. inflexions] used. This alphabet has spread in different directions and formed diverse branches, according to the circumstances; therefore there have been slight modifications in the sounds of the words [viz. spoken language]; but in its great features there has been no change. Middle India preserves the original character of the language in its integrity. Here the pronunciation is soft and agreeable, and like the language of the Devas [viz. the gods^*]. The pronunciation of the words is clear and pure, and fit as a model for all men. The people of the frontiers have contracted several erroneous modes of pronunciation; for according to the licentious habits of the people, so will be the corrupt nature of their language.²²

严格来说，正如我们所见，摩奴当时对“中原”（ Madhyadeśa）的理解，会将摩揭陀国和恒河下游地区排除在外，因为它们位于太东的地方。但实际上，我们可以从玄奘的著作中推断，在他那个时代，“中印度”的语言包含了华氏城（曾是多个印度帝国的古都）和那烂陀寺（当时印度最杰出的大学）的语言。

Strictly speaking, Manu’s contemporary conception of Madhyadeśa (’midland’) would, as we have seen, have excluded Magadha and the region of the lower Ganges as too far to the east. But in practice we can infer from Xuan-Zang that in his day the speech of ‘Middle India’ included the language of Pataliputra, ancient capital of several Indian empires, and of Nalanda, even then the pre-eminent university in the land.

梵语的传播

The spread of Sanskrit

印度的梵语

Sanskrit in India

梵语，如同大多数印欧语系姊妹语言一样，最初在我们眼中是征服者的语言，他们驾驭着马匹和轮式车辆，征服邻邦，将他们变成农奴和臣民。这种生活方式在印欧各民族的英雄诗歌中都屡见不鲜：他们驾驭战车作战，言辞直率，视个人荣誉高于生命本身。在梵语史诗《摩诃婆罗多》中，当克里希那为阿周那当日的职责出谋划策时，他仿佛是在对攻打特洛伊的希腊英雄阿喀琉斯（一千年前）或对抗康诺特大军的爱尔兰英雄库丘林（一千年后）讲话。

Sanskrit first appears to us, as do most of its Indo-European sister languages, as the speech of conquering warriors, well capable of using horses and wheeled vehicles to establish domination over their neighbours, and turn them into serfs and subjects. The way of life is familiar from heroic poetry of Indo-European peoples in every direction: men who fight from chariots, speak forthrightly, and care for their own personal honour more than life itself. When, in the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, Krishna advises Arjuna on his duty that day, he could be speaking to the Greek Achilles attacking Troy (a thousand years earlier), or the Irishman Cúchulainn standing against the hosts of Connacht (in a thousand years to come).

svadharmam api cāvek ya na vikampitum arhasi：

dharmyāddhi yuddhācchreyo 'nyat k atriyasya na vidyate。

yad cchyā copapannam svargadvaram apāv tam

sukhina k atriyā partha labhante yuddham īdrsam。

atha cet tvam ima dharmya sangrāma na kari yasi

tata svadharmam kīrtim ca hitvā pāpam avāpsyasi。

akīrtim capi bhūtāni kathayi yanti te' vyayam

sambhāvitasya cākīrtir mara ād atiricyate。

svadharmam api cāvekya na vikampitum arhasi:

dharmyāddhi yuddhācchreyo ‘nyat katriyasya na vidyate.

yadcchyā copapannam svargadvāram apāvtam

sukhina katriyā pārtha labhante yuddham īdrśam.

atha cet tvam ima dharmya sangrāma na kariyasi

tata svadharmam kīrtim ca hitvā pāpam avāpsyasi.

akīrtim cāpi bhūtāni kathayiyanti te’ vyayām

sambhāvitasya cākīrtir maraād atiricyate.

你也要恪守自己的职责，切不可退缩；

因为对于刹帝利而言，没有什么比正义之战更可贵。帕尔塔啊，

那些赢得这场不期而至的战斗的刹帝利是多么有福，这战斗如同通往天堂的大门，是上天赐予的。但如果你选择放弃这场正义之战，抛弃个人职责和荣耀，你就会陷入罪恶。世人会述说你永世的耻辱，而对于一个受人尊敬的人来说，耻辱比死亡更可怕。

Looking to your own duty too, you must not flinch;

for there is nothing better for a Kshatriya than a righteous fight.

Blest are the Kshatriyas who gain such a fight,

offered unsought, O Partha, as an open door to heaven.

But if you choose not to carry on this righteous conflict,

then discarding personal duty and glory, you will fall into sin.

Beings will tell of your eternal dishonour

and, for a respectable man, dishonour is worse than death.

《薄伽梵歌》第二卷第31-34章

Bhāgavad Gītā, ii.31-4

作为印度教神祇，克里希那确实将英雄准则的阐述建立在轮回神学和知识论之上，将行动世界简化为表象的影子游戏；但通过勇气和军事才能所表达的高贵基本伦理是清晰的。

Being a Hindu god, Krishna does go on to ground this exposition of the heroic code within a theology of reincarnation and a theory of knowledge that reduces the world of action to a shadow-play of appearances; but the basic ethic of nobility expressed through courage and military prowess is clear.

人们通常认为，正是这种生活态度，加上战马、轮式车辆和金属武器等主导技术，使得雅利安人的统治和语言传播到印度北部，并导致各个王国在这一时期几乎一直处于相互征战的动荡之中。（毕竟，这种语言传播模式在历史上的许多地方都有所体现，例如诺曼人将诺曼法语带到英格兰，或者征服者将西班牙语带到中美洲和南美洲。）

It is usually presumed that it was this attitude to life, together with the dominating technologies of warhorses, wheeled vehicles and metal weapons, which spread Aryan lordship and language across northern India, and then kept the various kingdoms in an almost constant roil of mutual warfare over this period. (This model of language spread is, after all, well attested in many parts of the world in the historical period, as when the Normans brought Norman French to England, or the conquistadores brought Spanish to Central and South America.)

但除了梵文史诗中记载的战役之外，无论是考古发现、铭文，还是本土传统，都鲜有证据表明梵语是通过战火和刀剑传播开来的。尤其是在印度，人们根深蒂固地认为印度教和梵语并非外来入侵的产物，而是完全在次大陆内部发展起来的。最近甚至有人试图为这种说法赋予完整的准神话色彩，提出这样一种理论：如果梵语与印欧语系其他语言存在语言和基因上的联系，那是因为雅利安人在返回其真正的故乡印度之前，曾在欧洲各地迁徙。 ²³

But besides the battles recounted in Sanskrit epics there is very little evidence, from archaeology, inscriptions or indeed from indigenous tradition, that the language was spread with fire and sword. Particularly in India, there is an ingrained belief that Hinduism and Sanskrit are not the result of alien invasions, but developed rather wholly within the subcontinent. There has even been a recent attempt to give this story a full quasi-mythological backing, developing the theory that, if there are linguistic and genetic links with the rest of the Indo-European language family, this is due to the spread of the Aryans round Europe before their return to their true home of India.²³

无论雅利安人史前迁徙的真相如何，有很多迹象表明，从一开始，马对他们来说就非常重要。在安纳托利亚中部（印度河以西 2500 英里）的赫梯图书馆中，我们发现了一本关于马术和战车的手册，由米坦尼安人基库利 (Kikkuli) 在公元前 2000 年中叶撰写：他将自己的职业称为“assussanni- ”，可以等同于吠陀梵语aśvasani “获得或获得马匹”，并且他的文本中充满了借词，这些词是显然是印度-雅利安语：课程可以是aikawartanna、terawartanna、panzawartanna、sattawartanna、nawartanna、“1-、3-、5-、7- 或 9-转”，这只是梵文eka-、tri-、pañca-、sapta-和nava-vartana。大多数米坦尼人说的是一种完全不相关的语言——胡里安语，但在几乎同时期用这种语言写成的另一篇文献（来自伊拉克北部的努齐城——约尔甘特佩）中，马的颜色是用接近梵语的词语表示的：babru（babhru），“栗色”，parita（palita），“灰色”，pinkara（pingala），“杂色”。

Whatever the truth of the Aryans’ prehistoric wanderings, there is a lot that shows that horses were important to them from the beginning. In the Hittite libraries of central Anatolia (2500 miles to the west of the Indus) we find a manual on horsemanship and chariotry, written by Kikkuli the Mitannian in the mid-second millennium BC: he gives his profession as assussanni-, which can be equated with the Vedic Sanskrit aśvasani ‘gaining or procuring horses’, and his text is full of loan words which are evidently Indo-Aryan: courses can be aikawartanna, terawartanna, panzawartanna, sattawartanna, nawartanna, ‘1-, 3-, 5-, 7- or 9-turns’, which is just Sanskrit eka-, tri-, pañca-, sapta- and nava-vartana. Most Mitannians spoke a completely unrelated language, Hurrian, but in another text written in this language at much the same time (from the city of Nuzi—Yorgan Tepe—in northern Iraq) horse colours are given in something close to Sanskrit: babru (babhru), ‘chestnut’, parita (palita), ‘grey’, pinkara (pingala), ‘roan’.

在这里，雅利安骑兵精英文化被强加于一个讲另一种语言的民众之上。证据可以追溯到很久以前，而且地点也十分遥远；但雅利安语在印度的早期发展状况可能非常相似。这一点甚至可以从梵语自身的结构中看出。

Here the Aryan elite culture of the horseman had been superimposed on a populace that spoke another language. The evidence stems from long before and far away; but the situation of the early days of Aryan language in India was probably very similar. This can be seen even within the structure of Sanskrit itself.

梵语及其相关的印度-雅利安语系语言与北部和西部的伊朗、俄罗斯和欧洲的同源语言不同，它们拥有一系列额外的辅音，梵语语法学家称之为“ mūrdhanya”（意为“头部”）音，西方人称之为卷舌塞音。这些音的发音位置与舌位不同，例如，发音时舌头向后卷曲抵住上颚，而发音时舌头则抵住前齿后方，例如t、d、th、dh和n 。因此， pa ati （分裂）与patati（落下）是不同的词， ma a（泡沫、奶油）与manda（沉闷）也是不同的词。这些音也是如今印度雅利安语系南部地区使用的达罗毗荼语系语言以及其他邻近语言（例如散布在印度东北部的蒙达语系语言）的特征音。虽然其他印欧语系语言都没有这些特征（因此它们不太可能是其起源语言的特征），但它们在达罗毗荼语系中却如此系统化，以至于它们可能与达罗毗荼语系一样古老。由此看来，它们似乎已作为一种“底层”特征在梵语和雅利安语中确立下来，成为早期梵语使用者所用语言的残留特征，并在他们学习新语言时得以保留。

Sanskrit and its related Indo-Aryan languages are different from all their relatives to the north and west, in Iran, Russia and Europe, in possessing an extra series of consonants, known to Sanskrit grammarians as the mūrdhanya (’in the head’) sounds, or to Westerners as the retroflex stops, after the position of the tongue: , , h, h and with the tongue curled backward against the roof of the mouth, as against t, d, th, dh and n, where the tongue touches the back of the front teeth. So paati, ‘splits’, is a different word from patati, ’falls’, and maa, ‘foam, cream’, from manda, ‘dull’. These sounds are also characteristic of the Dravidian languages now spoken to the south of the Aryan languages in India, as well as other neighbours, such as the Munda languages dotted around the north-east of India. Whereas no other Indo-European language has them (making them unlikely as a feature of whatever language they all originate from), they are so systematic in Dravidian that they are probably as old as the family. It would appear, then, that they have established themselves in Sanskrit and Aryan as a ‘substrate’, a residual feature of the languages that the earliest adopters of Sanskrit were speaking, and could not lose when they learned the new language.

《梨俱吠陀》中也有一些文化证据表明，入侵的雅利安人认为自己与当地居民（即达萨人和达修人^{）有所不同，因为他们认为达萨人和达修}^人肤色较深，属于“黑色血统”（kayonī ）。24这与梵语中传统上用于划分社会等级（婆罗门、刹帝利、吠舍、首陀罗）的词语“ va a ”（意为“颜色”）相吻合。在史诗《摩诃婆罗多》中，达修人由般度（“苍白者”）的两个幼子纳库拉和萨哈德瓦代表，他们是般度与第二任妻子玛德里所生。据说玛德里拥有黑色的眼睛和黝黑的肤色。在整部史诗中，他们忠实地支持着他们看似更高尚的雅利安族同父异母兄长尤迪什提拉（“战斗坚定”）、比玛（“可怕”）和阿朱那（“光辉灿烂”）。

There is also some cultural evidence in the Rig Veda which suggests how the invading Aryans felt they differed from the peoples, the dāsa and dasyu,^* their language came to dominate, for they saw them as having darker skins, ‘of black origin’, kayonī.²⁴ This fits with the Sanskrit word used traditionally for the four-fold division into social castes, Brahman~Kshatriya~Vaiśya~Śudra, namely vaa, ‘colour’. The dasyu are represented in the epic Mahabharata by the two younger sons of Pandu (’the Pale’), Nakula and Sahadeva, born to his second wife Madri, who is said to be black eyed and dusky complexioned. Throughout the epic, they act as faithful, but unimaginative, supporters of their apparently nobler Aryan elder half-brothers, Yuddhishthira (’Firm in Fight’), Bhīma (’terrible’) and Arjuna (’Resplendent’).

我们已经看到，与各地族群的同化过程一直持续到公元第二个千年，而且在印度北部和中部的一些地区，似乎还伴随着语言的万花筒般的演变。在这一漫长的变迁模式中，至少在政治上，最令人难忘的时刻之一发生在公元前260年左右，当时阿育王征服了东部的卡林加王国（大致位于今天的奥里萨邦境内）。这次征服是印度帝国统一的巅峰，此后两千年无人能及。阿育王用摩揭陀语、阿拉姆语和希腊语将这段经历记录在了他帝国的其他地区：“在他统治的第八年，皮亚达西征服了卡林加。那里有15万人被俘虏并流放，另有10万人被杀，几乎同样多的人丧生。从那时起，怜悯和同情之心便攫住了他，他被这种情感深深地触动了……”

We have seen that the process of assimilation with various local groups continued well into the second millennium AD, and seems to have involved a kaleidoscopic succession of languages in some parts of north and central India. One of the most memorable moments, at least politically, in this long series of shifting patterns occurred about 260 BC, when Aśoka conquered the eastern kingdom of Kalinga (approximately the area of modern Orissa). This conquest was a high-water mark for imperial unity in India, one not to be exceeded for two thousand years. Aśoka wrote this of the experience all over the rest of his empire (in Magadhi, Aramaic and Greek): ‘In the eighth year of his reign, Piyadasi conquered Kalinga. 150,000 people were captured there and deported, 100,000 others were killed and almost as many perished. Since that time, pity and compassion gripped him, and he was overwhelmed by that…’

这种慈悲之心终结了他的征服战争，使他转而传播佛法（梵文：dharmā），佛法可译为“美德”、“责任”或“法”。据说他曾站在道里山上，亲眼目睹达亚河被鲜血染红。他在那里的一块岩石碑文上专门写给卡林加人民，没有叙述战役，而是写道：“所有人都是我的孩子。正如我希望我的孩子们在今世和来世都能获得各种福祉和幸福一样，我也希望所有人都能如此。但你们并不了解我在这方面的心意有多深远。你们当中或许有些人明白，但即使是这些人，也只是部分明白，而非完全明白……”

This compassion put an end to his wars of conquest, and made him turn instead to the propagation of dhamma (Sanskrit dharmā), variously translated as ‘virtue’, ‘duty’ or ‘the Law’. It is said that he stood on the hill at Dhauli, and saw the Daya river flow red with blood. Writing specifically to the Kalinga population on a rock inscription at that spot, he says, instead of recounting the campaign: ‘All men are my children. Just as, in regard to my own children, I desire that they may be provided with all kinds of welfare and happiness in this world and in the next, the same I desire also in regard to all men. But you do not understand how far my intention goes in this respect. A few among you perchance understand it but even such of you understand it partly and not fully…’

事实上，阿育王的征服对卡林加的语言产生了何种影响（如果有的话），至今仍是个谜。毕竟时间太久远了，而且此后发生了太多事情。

In fact, it remains obscure what, if any, linguistic effect Aśoka’s conquest had on Kalinga. It is just too long ago, and too much has happened since.

奥里萨邦如今主要使用雅利安语（但也夹杂着一些不相关的土著语言）：该邦最早的文字铭文可追溯至公元十世纪。奥里亚语与更北部的孟加拉语密切相关；但人们对其早期历史知之甚少，甚至有人认为，奥里萨邦在公元七世纪时仍未成为雅利安语地区。^玄奘曾指出该地区至少存在三个不同的国家：乌拉（奥里萨邦名称的由来），他认为其“词汇和语言与印度中部不同”；孔雀王朝，“书写文字与印度中部相同，但语言和发音方式截然不同”；以及卡林加，“语言轻快流畅，发音清晰准确。但在词汇和发音方面，都与印度中部大相径庭”。²⁶这种证据只是一个例子，说明为什么很难详细描绘过去几个世纪印度的语言地图。

Orissa is now a mainly Aryan-speaking area (with a strong sprinkling of unrelated ādivāsi, i.e. ‘aboriginal’, languages): the earliest inscriptions in its language date from the tenth century AD. The language is Oriya, closely related to the Bengali spoken farther north; but little is known of its earlier history, and it has been suggested that Orissa was still non-Aryan even in the seventh century AD.²⁵ Xuan-Zang recognised at least three distinct countries in this region: Ura (the origin of the name Orissa), which he said had ‘words and language different from Central India’, Kōnyōdha, ‘with the same written characters as those of mid-India, but language and mode of pronunciation quite different’, and Kalinga, where ‘the language is light and tripping, and their pronunciation is distinct and correct. But in both particulars, that is, as to words and sounds, they are very different from mid-India.’²⁶ This kind of evidence is just one example of what makes it so difficult to depict in any detail the language map of India in past centuries.

随着印度教文化的传播，梵语的影响进一步向南渗透，最终渗透到三种主要的非雅利安语系语言——泰卢固语、卡纳达语和马拉雅拉姆语中，并吸收了大量的外来词汇。位于东南极点的泰米尔语受到的语言影响较小，尽管其社会最终也同样信奉印度教。除了这种词汇的逐渐输出之外，公元前一千年中期，还发生了一次大规模的人口迁徙，将一个拥有雅利安语系语言的社群迁徙到了极南地区。这解释了僧伽罗语在斯里兰卡的存在。关于携带这种语言的人口迁徙的历史记载并不完整，但史诗《罗摩衍那》中的传说或许有所反映，该史诗的高潮是一场远征斯里兰卡的军事行动。 ^*大约两百年后，公元前三世纪末，阿育王派遣他的儿子摩哂陀前往斯里兰卡传教，从而加强了斯里兰卡与雅利安北方之间的联系，创立了至今仍然存在的上座部佛教。

Sanskrit influence permeated farther south, with the cultural spread of Hinduism, eventually saturating with borrowed words three of the major non-Aryan languages, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Tamil, in the extreme south-east, was less affected linguistically, although its society was ultimately no less Hindu. And besides this gradual export of words, there had also been, in the middle of the first millennium BC, a major transplant of a whole community, with its Aryan language, to the extreme south. This accounts for the presence of Sinhala in Śri Lanka. The history of the movement of people that brought this language is not documented, but it may be reflected through legend in the epic Ramayana, which climaxes in a military expedition to this island.^* About two hundred years later, in the late third century BC, the links between Śri Lanka and the Aryan north were reinforced when Aśoka sent his son Mahinda to the island as a Buddhist missionary, so founding the Theravada school of Buddhism which has endured to this day.

东南亚的梵语

Sanskrit in South-East Asia

迁徙至斯里兰卡或许可以被视为梵语传播到印度以外地区的开端。这种海上扩张使其在全球历史中具有更为重要的意义，因为梵语是历史上第一个通过海上网络传播的语言，它通过与彼岸民族建立贸易和文化联系而得以传播。从这个意义上讲，梵语可以被视为过去五百年间西欧语言传播的先驱。

The move to Śri Lanka may be seen as the beginning of Sanskrit’s spread beyond the shores of India. This seaborne expansion makes its significance far greater to the global story, for Sanskrit is the first example in history of a language travelling over a maritime network, through the establishment of trade and cultural links with peoples on the other side. In this, it can be seen as a precursor of the spread of the western European languages in the last five hundred years.

公元第一个千年中期，梵语已成为印度化文明的标志，遍及整个东南亚，包括现代马来西亚和印度尼西亚的主要岛屿。至于梵语是如何传播开来的，并没有明确的记载。但梵语传播的一个特点是显而易见的：它并非军事扩张。印度人从未以战争的方式入侵亚洲，即使是那些典型的短暂的印度帝国，即便在北印度，也似乎从未持续超过几代人。

By the middle of the first millennium AD, Sanskrit was established as the hallmark of Indianised civilisation, all over South-East Asia, including the main islands of modern Malaysia and Indonesia. There is no clear record of how this came about. But one feature of the spread of Sanskrit is clear: it was not a military expansion. There was never a warlike move by Indians into Asia, even of the typical short-term Indian empires, which even in north India never seemed to last more than a very few generations.

但如果我们撇开军事野心不谈，人们提出的印度取得胜利的动机已经穷尽了其他所有可能性：从孔雀王朝和阿育王时代开始，为了躲避帝国战争；为了进行海盗袭击；出于冒险精神；为了和平地从事贸易；或者为了传播神圣的知识，当然包括佛教，或许更早的时候还包括印度教。^*

But if we leave aside military ambition, the motives that have been suggested for the Indian successes exhaust every other possibility: refuge from imperial wars from the Mauryas and Aśoka onward, piratical raids, a spirit of adventure, the peaceful pursuit of trade, or a desire to spread sacred learning, of Buddhism certainly, and perhaps earlier even of Hinduism.^*

这些说法各有其道理，而且它们并非相互排斥。例如，马来人和柬埔寨人对印度的称呼是“Kling”，即卡林加（Kalinga），也就是阿育王血腥征服的印度东部沿海王国，这必然具有某种意义。在那里，尤其是在北部地区塔姆拉利普塔（Tāmralipta，意为“涂铜之地”，即今天的西孟加拉邦塔姆卢克），盛产“sārthavāhā”或“ sādhava ”（商人），这些人很容易与“sāhasikā”（海盗、私掠者）混淆，后者在梵语中因其勇敢和暴力而广为人知。公元六世纪的实用智慧宝典《五卷书》（Pañcatantra）中记载：

Each of these has something to recommend it, and they are not mutually exclusive. It must mean something, for example, that the name for India current among Malays and Cambodians was ‘Kling’, that is Kalinga, the coastal realm in eastern India bloodily conquered by Aśoka. There, and especially in its northern region Tāmralipta (’copper-smeared’, modern Tamluk in West Bengal), there was a tradition of producing sārthavāhā or sādhava, ‘merchants’, who were easily confused with sāhasikā, ‘pirates, buccaneers’, proverbial in Sanskrit for their bravery, as well as violence. In the treasury of practical wisdom from the sixth century AD, Pañcatantra, it is remarked:

bhayam atulam gurulokāt t am iva tulayanti sadhu sāhasika

bhayam atulam gurulokāt tam iva tulayanti sādhu sāhasikā

商船海盗们认为，重物带来的恐惧轻如鸿毛^。27

Merchant-buccaneers reckon light as straw the fear instilled by the weighty.²⁷

大约在这一时期创作的，讲述佛陀前世故事的流行本生经，也充满了前往苏瓦阿布胡米寻求财富的商人的故事。

The popular Jātaka tales of previous lives of the Buddha, composed around this time, are also full of merchants who seek wealth in Suvaabhūmi.

^{在梵语罗马}化字母中，c 的发音与church中的ch相同，j 的发音与judge 中的 j 相同。t、d 或 n 下方的点表示发音时舌头要向后卷舌（卷舌音）。h 下方的点表示它后面跟着前一个元音的回声（例如ka，表示“谁”，发音为kah ^a）。r 或 i 下方的点表示它作为一个单独的音节发音，例如bitter 和 little在美式英语中的发音。m 下方的点表示它只是通过鼻化前面的元音来发音：aha，表示“我”，发音类似于美式英语中的“uhuh?”。所有塞音（k、g、c、j、t、d 、、、p、b）都可以送气，送气音用后面的 h 表示。日语中有三个咝音，ś、s和 s：前两个音接近英语的sh，前者像sheet中的 sh ，后者发音较暗，像push 中的 sh。

^* In the romanised script for Sanskrit, c is pronounced as ch in church, j as in judge. A dot under t, d or n means that it must be sounded with tongue turned back, retroflex. A dot under an h means that it is followed by an echo of the previous vowel (e.g. ka, ‘who’, as kah^a). A dot under an r or an I means that it is pronounced as a separate syllable, as bitter, little in American English. A dot under an m means that is pronounced simply by nasalising the preceding vowel: aha, ‘I’, is like American ‘uhuh?’. All the stop consonants (k, g, c, j, t, d, , , p, b) can be aspirated, and this is shown by a following h. There are three sibilants, ś, and s: the first two are close to English sh, the former as in sheet, the latter with the darker sound as in push.

印度人赋予东方世界部分地区的梵文名称也暗示了贸易的动机。斯里兰卡被称为Tāmradvīpa，意为“铜岛”或Tāmrapa ī，意为“铜叶之地”；东海之外的土地被称为Suva advīpa或Suva abhūmi，意为“黄金之岛”或“黄金之地”。这些名称流传下来，被希腊探险家沿用或翻译，例如用Taprobanē指代斯里兰卡，用Khrysē Khersonēsos指代东南亚，意为“黄金半岛”。这些国家已知的地质情况几乎没有证据表明这些名称有依据。但对贵金属的追寻显然是古代航海传奇的一部分。在梵语版的《一千零一夜》 ——索玛德瓦的《故事之海》（Kathāsaritsāgaram ）中，有一个最引人入胜的故事，讲述了一位婆罗门为了寻找他失散的爱人，踏上了前往卡纳卡普里（Kanakapurī ，意为“黄金之城”）的旅程。卡纳卡普里位于“群岛”之外的某个地方。途中，他遇到一位商人，这位商人的父亲曾远航至一座遥远的岛屿，满载黄金而归。

The motive for the trade is also hinted at by the Sanskrit names that the Indians gave to parts of this eastern world. Śri Lanka was known as Tāmradvīpa, ‘copper island’, or Tāmrapaī, ‘copper-leafed’; the land beyond the eastern ocean as Suvaadvīpa, Suvaabhūmi, ‘the isle, or the land, of gold’. These names survived to be taken up, or translated, by Greek explorers, Taprobanē for Śri Lanka, and Khrysē Khersonēsos, ‘Golden Peninsula’, for South-East Asia. There is little in these countries’ known geology to suggest that the names were well founded. But the quest for precious metals was clearly part of the legend of such ancient navigation. One of the most evocative tales in the Sanskrit equivalent of the 1001 Nights, Somadeva’s Kathāsaritsāgaram (’Ocean of the Streams of Story’), recounts the quest of a Brahman, setting out for his lost loves in Kanakapurī, ‘The City of Gold’, located somewhere beyond ‘The Islands’. One of the merchants he meets on his way has a father who returns rich from a long voyage to a far island, his ship loaded specifically with gold.

更实际地说，转口贸易蕴藏着巨大的利润空间，例如用印度芳香树脂（包括乳香（kundura）和没药（vola））交换中国丝绸，或者从苏门答腊岛获取樟脑（karpūra），从帝汶岛获取檀香（candana ），或从摩鹿加群岛获取丁香（lavanga ） ^。28

More realistically, there was scope for immense profit either in entrepôt business, exchanging Indian aromatic resins (including frankincense (kundura) and myrrh (vola)) for Chinese silk, or in obtaining local products such as camphor (karpūra) from Sumatra, sandalwood (candana) from Timor or cloves (lavanga) from the Moluccas.²⁸

印度人从次大陆各地出发前往这片黄金之地。显然，最短的航程是从高阿（今孟加拉）和卡林加出发：我们知道法显和易经都曾从塔姆拉利普蒂乘船。但从六月到十一月，孟加拉湾盛行西南风，因此从南部海岸航行最为直接，而希腊人记录的所有港口都位于这一区域。 ²⁹在苏门答腊和马来半岛发现的一些泰米尔语铭文证实了这条路线。西海岸的港口也有不少人前往东方：一句古老的古吉拉特谚语提到了从爪哇回来的水手们的财富。 ³⁰

Indians set out for this Land of Gold from all round the subcontinent. Evidently, the shortest journey was from Gaua (modern Bengal) and Kalinga: we know that Fa-Xian and Yi-Jing took ship from Tamralipti. But the prevailing wind across the Bay of Bengal from June to November is south-westerly, so the most direct sailing was to be had from the southern shores, and this is the area of all the ports noted by the Greeks.²⁹ A handful of inscriptions in Tamil, turning up in Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, confirm this route. The ports of the western coast also had their share of departures for the east: an old Gujarati proverb mentions the wealth of sailors back from Java.³⁰

比起印度萨达瓦人的动机，我们更感兴趣的是他们会如何出现在当地居民面前，这些居民被印度人称为“dvīpāntara ”，意为“岛民”。这些人，东部是缅甸人，南部是南亚语系民族（孟族、高棉族或占族），岛屿上是马来人，他们已经使用青铜器，种植灌溉稻米，驯养牛和水牛，并拥有自己的船只。他们当时并不识字。印度人会以来访贵宾的身份拜访当地酋长，可能声称自己与远在海外的皇室有联系，并赠送礼物，或许还有药品和护身符。他们赢得了当地精英的青睐，一些人甚至娶了他们的女儿为妻，从而播下了新王朝的种子。

More interesting for us than the motivation of the Indian sādhava is how they would have appeared to the receiving populations, known to the Indians as dvīpāntara, ‘islanders’. These people, Burmese in the east, Austro-Asiatic in the south (Mon, Khmer, or Cham), Malay in the islands, already used bronze, irrigated rice, domesticated cattle and buffalo, and had ships and boats of their own. They would not have been able to read or write. The Indians would have presented themselves to the local chiefs as visiting dignitaries, probably claiming royal connections back across the ocean, and offering gifts, and perhaps medicines and charms. Winning favour with local elites, some went on to take their daughters in marriage, and thus sow the seeds of new dynasties.

印度人带来的是识字能力，以及一套涵盖各种场合的庞大规则体系（印度教的《法典》或佛教的《经集》）。还有完整的印度教神话体系，使得阿伽斯提亚、克里希纳、罗摩和般度五子等人物家喻户晓，自此在东南亚地区广为流传。他们还带来了独特的君主与祭司互补角色的观念，诚然，双方在最终孰高孰低的问题上存在分歧，但显然处于相互扶持的关系之中。这种关系能够巩固并永久化统治者的合法性。因此，印度人遇到的统治者都乐于与他们成为朋友、商业伙伴和岳父。通过跨文化婚姻诞生的新一代，很可能是第一批接受完整梵语教育的人。

What the Indians brought with them was literacy, and an ancient culture with a vast array of rules (the sutras of the Hindu Dharmaśāstras, or the suttas of the Buddhist Tipiaka) for every occasion. There was the whole mythology of Hinduism, making Agastya, Krishna, Rama and the Pandava brothers into household names, as they have been ever since in South-East Asia. There was the distinctive idea of the complementary roles of king and priest, admittedly at sixes and sevens over which was ultimately the higher, but clearly in a relationship of mutual support. This relationship could underwrite, and make permanent, the legitimacy of rulers. And so the rulers that the Indians met were happy to become their friends, business partners and fathers-in-law. The new generation that sprang from the mixed marriages would have been the first to receive a full Sanskrit education.

他们带来的印度文明的一个特点是字母的修改和定制倾向。正如现在至少有十种主要文字^*源自印度的婆罗米文（在阿育王时代已遍布次大陆），另有九种文字在东南亚、印度尼西亚和菲律宾发展起来†，它们都源自印度文字，其中许多是通过南方的帕拉瓦文字演变而来。这种多样性的根源在于不同地区可用的书写材料各不相同，但不同的文字风格显然成为了民族的象征。在柬埔寨刻有寺院规章的石柱上，一面是高棉文梵文，另一面是北印度文梵文：或许当时这里既有高棉人，也有北印度信徒。 ³¹

One characteristic of Indian civilisation that they brought with them was a tendency to modify and customise the alphabet. Just as there are now at least ten major scripts^* derived in India from the Brahmi characters (diffused all over the subcontinent in Aśoka’s time), there are another nine that developed in South-East Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines,† all derived from Indian scripts, many through the Pallava script of the south. The origin of this diversity lies in the variety of writing materials available in different places, but the different styles evidently came to be national icons. In the Cambodian pillars that carry rules for monasteries, Sanskrit in Khmer script on one side is paralleled by Sanskrit in a North Indian script on the other: perhaps there were North Indian devotees as well as Khmers resident here.³¹

这只是众多迹象之一，表明在这一时期，印度和印度支那之间有着频繁的双向文化交流。另一个例子是阿底峡僧人的生平。阿底峡僧人于公元982年出生于孟加拉，六十多岁时成为西藏佛教的创始人之一。他早年求学是在苏门答腊的室利佛逝寺度过的。

This is just one of many signs that there was heavy cultural traffic in both directions between India and Indo-China during this period. Another example is given by the life of Atīśa, a monk born in Bengal in 982, who went on to become one of the founders of Buddhism in Tibet in his sixties. He had spent his student days in Śri Vijaya, in Sumatra.

从某种意义上说，印度人带来的文化对我们来说永远是个谜。缅甸的瑞光大金塔、爪哇的婆罗浮屠、吴哥窟的壮丽景色……

In a way, the culture as the Indians brought it will always be a mystery to us. The splendours of Shwe Dagon in Burma, Borobodur in Java, Angkor

柬埔寨的寺庙，以及蒲甘、占婆、老挝、巴厘岛和苏门答腊等地一些鲜为人知的宏伟建筑，从公元500年左右开始，历经千年建成，都源于印度的开创性理念。但至少就建筑风格而言，如今印度已找不到与之相似的建筑。我们只能推测，婆罗浮屠和吴哥窟的石砌建筑风格或许与早已在印度南部消失的木结构建筑有所关联。

Wat in Cambodia, as well as less well-known magnificences in Pagan, Champa, Laos, Bali and Sumatra, built over a millennium from about AD 500, all stemmed from the seminal ideas of the Indians, but at least in terms of architecture there is nothing now quite like them back in India. We can only speculate that styles executed in stone at Borobodur and Angkor Wat may echo the architecture of wooden buildings long vanished from southern India.

然而，这份源自印度的众多国家和文明的名单提醒我们，这种影响是多么广泛、多么多元、多么持久，尤其令人瞩目的是，似乎没有任何武力被用来将这种新兴的、组织更为严密的印度社会引入其他地区。这与北方另一个发达文明的入侵记录形成了鲜明对比。自公元1世纪以来，中国就不断向越南北部的安南王国施压，不时入侵，并坚持要求安南承认中国皇帝为其宗主国。

Nevertheless, this roll-call of states and civilisations that took their beginnings from India reminds us how vast, how varied and how long lasting this influence was, all the more remarkable because no military force seems to have been applied anywhere to bring in the new, more organised, Indian society. This contrasts sharply with the record of incursions from the other developed civilisation to the north. Ever since the first century AD, China had been putting constant pressure on the Annamite kingdom of northern Vietnam, periodically invading it, and insisting on recognition of China’s emperor as its overlord.

有记载的最早的印度化王国——文献记载来自中国——位于湄公河下游，即今天的柬埔寨和越南南部，可能在公元1世纪。它通常被称为扶南，这是其名称的中文译名。在柬埔寨语中，它实际上被称为“山” （Bnam），^*其国王被称为“山王” （kurung bnam），是帕尔瓦塔布帕拉（Parvatabhū-pala）或赛拉拉贾（Śailarāja）的译名：这位“山王”很可能在高处建立了湿婆神的崇拜，从而调和了他作为印度国王的合法性与这片土地上的本土神灵^。32

The earliest documented Indianised kingdom—the documentation is Chinese—was set on the lower Mekong, in modern Cambodia and southern Vietnam, probably in the first century AD. It is usually known as Funan, which is a Chinese version of its name. It was really called, in Khmer, Bnam, ‘the mountain’,^* and its king as kurung bnam, a translation of Parvatabhū-pala or Śailarāja: bearing this title of ‘King of the Mountain’, he would have established a cult of the god Siva in a high place, so reconciling his legitimacy as an Indian king with the native spirits of the land.³²

扶南的建城神话，取自占婆的一块梵文铭文，³³证实了这一点。一位名叫考因雅（Kau inya，源自湿婆神的称号之一“库因”）的婆罗门从另一位婆罗门——《摩诃婆罗多》中的英雄阿什瓦塔曼（Aśvattāman ）——那里得到一支标枪，并投掷它以寻找建城的合适地点。他娶了一位名叫索玛（Soma）的当地公主，她是那伽（Nāgas）之王的女儿。那伽是多头水蛇，被奉为高棉财富的守护神。

Funan’s foundation myth, read from a Sanskrit inscription in Champa,³³ confirms this. A Brahman named Kauinya (derived from Kuin, one of Siva’s titles) received a javelin from another Brahman, a hero from the Mahabharata named Aśvattāman, and threw it to find the right site for the city. He married a local princess named Soma, daughter of the king of the Nāgas, the many-headed water cobras worshipped as protectors of Khmer riches.

此后，东南亚、苏门答腊和爪哇各地建立了许多主要的梵语国家。^†这些国家的名称本身就是梵语，要么体现了与遥远的印度圣地之间的情感联系，要么体现了印度化当地名称的尝试。如今，要准确定位这些国家往往十分困难。在马来亚，有兰卡苏卡（Lankasuka），它控制着一条从孟加拉湾通往暹罗湾的常用陆路，此外还有丹布拉林加（Tāmbralinga，即利戈尔）、塔科拉（Takkola，即达瓜巴）和卡阿哈（ Kā aha ，即吉打）；在占婆（今越南南部），有阿马拉瓦提（Amarāvatī，即东阳）、维贾亚（Vijaya，即平定）、考哈拉（ Kau hara ，即芽庄）和帕乌朗加（ Pā uranga，即藩朗）；在爪哇，有塔鲁玛（Tārumā，位于雅加达附近）和东部的卡拉贾（ Ka arāja ）；在苏门答腊，有马拉尤（Malāyu，即占碑）和斯里维贾亚（ Śrī Vijaya ，即巨港）。在缅甸，Sudhammavatī（Thaton）、Śrīk etra（Prome 或 Thayekhettaya）、Ha savatī（勃固）、Śrī Deva（Si Thep）；位于现代泰国曼谷北部的Dvaravatī地区。

Thereafter, major Sanskrit-speaking states were set up all over South-East Asia, Sumatra and Java.^† Their names are themselves in Sanskrit, and show either a sentimental link with other Indian holy places far away, or an attempt to Indianise local names. It is often difficult now to locate them exactly. In Malaya, Lankasuka, controlling one much-used overland route from the Bay of Bengal to the Gulf of Siam, beside Tāmbralinga (Ligor), Takkola (Takuapa) and Kāaha (Kedah); in Cham, the south of modern Vietnam, Amarāvatī (Dong-duong), Vijaya (Binh-dinh), Kauhara (Nha-trang), Pāuranga (Phanrang); in Java, Tārumā (round Jakarta) and Kaarāja in the east; in Sumatra, Malāyu (Jambi), Śrī Vijaya (Palembang); in Burma, Sudhammavatī (Thaton), Śrīketra (Prome or Thayekhettaya), Hasavatī (Pegu), Śrī Deva (Si Thep); and in the region of modern Thailand Dvāravatī, north of Bangkok.

统治者的名字也通常源自梵语。例如，柬埔寨有三十多位国王的名字以“-varman”（意为“堡垒”）结尾，从公元514年去世的阇耶跋摩（Jayavarman ）到公元1307-1327年的仁陀罗阇耶跋摩（ Śrīndrajayavarman）；印度尼西亚满者伯夷王朝的国王也以“-varman”结尾，从公元1222-1227年的拉贾萨（ Rājasa）到公元1429-1447年的苏希塔（Suhitā）。^*

Names of rulers too are typically Sanskritic. Good examples are the more than thirty Cambodian kings whose names end in -varman, ‘bastion’, from Jayavarman, who died in AD 514, to Śrīndrajayavarman, 1307-27, and the Majapahit kings of Indonesia from Rājasa in 1222-7 to Suhitā, 1429—47.^*

由于当时的习俗是以建城国王的名字来命名城市，因此出现了更多梵语地名。例如，柬埔寨首都舍利哈布拉（Śre hapura ，字面意思是“最好的城市”）就是以其创建者舍利哈瓦尔曼国王（ Śre havarman ，意为“最好的堡垒”）的名字命名的。同样，苏门答腊南部的主导王国室利佛逝（ Śri Vijaya）很可能也是以一位名叫维贾亚（ Vijaya，意为“胜利者”）的国王的名字命名的。

These led to many more Sanskrit place names, since it was customary to name a city after the king that founded it. To give one example among many dozens, Śrehapura (literally ‘best of cities’), capital of Cambodia, was named after its founder, King Śrehavarman (’best bastion’). It is likely also that Śri Vijaya, the dominant kingdom in southern Sumatra, was named after a king named Vijaya, ‘Victorious’.

这只是其中一些比较知名的例子；可以预见的是，所有这些城市和国王之间长达一千年的关系史是一个庞大而错综复杂的主题，不适合在这里展开讨论。

This is just a sample of some of the better known; as could be expected, the history of the relations of all these cities and kings over a thousand years is a vast and labyrinthine subject, and not one to be broached here.

人们很容易忽略梵语的引入对当地居民来说是多么巨大的改变。梵语作为一种语言类型，与当地语言（如今被归类为缅语系、南亚语系和南岛语系）截然不同。梵语是多音节语言，具有高度屈折变化，辅音系统复杂，不排斥长辅音群。词序自由。而当时，其他语言的使用者却在学习梵语，这些语言的词汇短小，通常通过声调来区分，由以单个辅音开头和结尾的简单音节构成。这些语言的屈折变化简单甚至没有，但词序却很固定。这至少与在人们此前只会说英语或荷兰语的地方引入日语作为精英语言一样具有颠覆性。这种冲击之大，从一些梵语名字的残缺不全便可见一斑：Śrik etra变成了 Thayekhettaya，Śrī Deva变成了 Si Thep。

It is easy to overlook what a major change the introduction of Sanskrit must have been for the local peoples. Sanskrit, as a type of language, was fearsomely different from the local languages, now classified as Burman, Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian. Sanskrit is polysyllabic, and highly inflected, with a complicated consonant system that is not averse to long clusters. Word order is free. This language was being taken up by speakers of other languages where words were short, often distinguished by tone, and made up of simple syllables with single consonants at beginning and end. Inflections were simple or absent, but word order was rigid. It was at least as radical a change as it would be to bring Japanese in as an elite language where previously everyone had known only English or Dutch. What a wrench it was can be seen in the mangled remains of some of the Sanskrit names: Śriketra came out as Thayekhettaya, Śrī Deva as Si Thep.

然而，这片土地上的土著居民所习得的梵文书写质量与印度梵文几乎没有差别。我们在这里书写的文本中看不到明显的“底层影响”。谈到柬埔寨，R.C. Majumdar 指出，其已知的铭文年代从公元475年到1327年，通常“以优美且近乎完美的诗歌（ kāvya）风格写成，有些篇幅很长……几乎所有梵文韵律都在这些诗歌中得到了成功运用，它们展现了对梵文修辞和韵律最成熟的规则和惯例的透彻理解。” ³⁴这些铭文也充满了对吠陀经和印度各学科（尤其是语法）的博学而又诙谐的引用。

Nevertheless, the quality of written Sanskrit that the natives acquired in this part of the world deviated hardly at all from that of India. We do not see strong ‘substrate influence’ in the texts written here. Talking of Cambodia, R. C. Majumdar remarks that its inscriptions, known from AD 475 to 1327, are generally ‘composed in beautiful and almost flawless kāvya—i.e. poetic—style, and some of them run to great lengths… Almost all the Sanskrit metres have been successfully used in these verses, and they exhibit a thorough acquaintance with the most developed rules and conventions of Sanskrit rhetoric and prosody.’³⁴ The inscriptions are also full of learned, even witty, allusions to the Vedas and all the different branches of Indian learning, especially grammar.

其中成就尤为卓著的是阇耶跋摩七世（1181—约1218年统治柬埔寨）的王后因陀罗黛维：她是一位虔诚的佛教徒，曾教导三座寺院的尼姑。她留下了一篇题词，赞颂她英年早逝的妹妹——一位同样博学的学者：这篇题词共102行，采用多种不同的韵律^。35

Particularly accomplished was Queen Indradevi, consort of Jayavarman VII (who ruled in Cambodia 1181—c.1218): she was a pious Buddhist and taught the Buddhist nuns of three convents. She has left an inscription, in praise of her younger sister, another scholar, who had sadly died young: it runs to 102 verses in several different metres.³⁵

印度支那的一些文学作品被纳入梵文经典。瓦拉鲁奇的《精华集》（ Sārasamuccaya）一书颇具震撼力：为了展现观点的差异，他描绘了一位女性的乳房——先是被她的孩子看到，然后是被她的丈夫看到；接着是她的遗体，先是被一位苦行僧看到，然后是被她的情人看到，最后是被一条狗看到。后来，他在给无神论者（nāstika，字面意思是“非存在者”）的建议中，预示了帕斯卡的赌注：如果没有来世，那么无论信奉什么都无妨；但如果有来世，那么受苦的将是无神论者。 ³⁶

Some of the literature written in Indo-China joined the canon of Sanskrit classics. Vararuci’s Sārasamuccaya (’collection of essences’) could be hard hitting: to show how views can differ, he evokes a woman’s breast—seen by her child, and by her husband; and then her dead body, seen first by an ascetic, then by her lover, and then by a dog. Later on, he prefigures Pascal’s wager in his advice to the atheist (nāstika—literally the ‘isn’t-ist’): if there is no world after death, there is nothing to fear either way; but if there is, it will be the atheists who stand to suffer.³⁶

梵文经典显然在新兴印度教教派的创立中扮演了重要角色，这些教派的建立可能是为了巩固新独立的国家：例如，12世纪阇耶跋摩一世将柬埔寨从爪哇的统治下解放出来后，他邀请了一位名叫希拉·亚达摩（意为“金绳”）的婆罗门主持密教仪式，以确保柬埔寨在其统治者统治下的自由。由此产生的提婆罗阇（意为“神王”）崇拜持续了250年，其根基明确地建立在四部指定的梵文经典之上。如果没有梵文及其所蕴含的古代智慧，这一切都不可能实现。

Sanskrit texts apparently played an important role in the foundation of new Hindu cults, which might be founded to buttress newly independent states: so when Jayavarman freed Cambodia from Javanese control in the twelfth century, he invited a Brahman named Hirayadāma (’Golden Cord’) to perform Tantric rites to guarantee this freedom, under its own ruler. The resulting cult of Devarāja (’god-king’) lasted for 250 years, explicitly based on four named śāstra texts. It could not have been done without Sanskrit, and the access to ancient wisdom that it implied.

梵语中蕴含的神圣力量有时会引发一种精神上的怀旧之情。据说占婆国王恒河二王（Gangaraja）为了能在恒河岸边辞世，而放弃了王位。此外，老挝瓦隆考寺（Vat Luong Kau）的一块铭文也体现了这种奉献精神，它记载了国王斯里·德瓦尼卡（Śrī Devanīka）计划在家乡建立一座新的俱卢克圣地（Kuruk etra），以替代位于德里以北的真正俱卢克圣地（Kuruk etra）的神圣。作为《摩诃婆罗多》中那场伟大战役的发生地，它曾是无与伦比的圣地，可惜的是，它一直无法到达。他引用了这部史诗中的一段话：

The sense of numinous power infusing Sanskrit led on occasions to a sort of spiritual nostalgia. One king of Champa, Gangaraja, is said to have abdicated his throne so as to have the chance to give up the ghost on the banks of the Ganges. And, more public-spiritedly, there is evidence from an inscription put up at Vat Luong Kau in Laos that a king called Śrī Devanīka planned to set up a new Kuruketra at home as a substitute for the sheer holiness of the real Kuruketra north of Delhi. As the site of the Mahabharata’s great battle, it was peerless among shrines, but sadly inaccessible. He quotes the epic:

P thivyā Naimi am pu yam antarīk e tu Pu karam Trāyānām api lokānām Kuruk etram viśi yate。

Pthivyā Naimiam puyam antarīke tu Pukaram Trāyānām api lokānām Kuruketram viśiyate.

人间有福的奈米沙，虚空中有普什卡拉，但三界之中，俱卢之野才是王者^。37

On the earth the blessed Naimisha, in the ether Pushkara, But in the three worlds, Kurukshetra holds the crown.³⁷

印度影响持续了整整一千年，最终才告一段落。早在十三世纪，蒙古人洗劫了北方的蒲甘王国和其他缅甸王国，就给缅甸带来了巨大的冲击。但一位著名学者带着几分怀旧之情指出，印度文明的衰落恰恰是其自身日益增长的影响力所致：“导致印度文明衰落的根本原因在于，越来越多的土著居民接受了印度文明，并将越来越多的本土习俗融入其中；此外，作为梵语文化守护者的上流贵族阶层也逐渐消失。” ³⁸

The long years of Indian influence came to an end only after a full millennium. A major jolt had already come in the thirteenth century, when the Mongols sacked Pagan and other Burmese kingdoms in the north. But it has been suggested by one of the leading scholars, not without nostalgia, that Indian civilisation was the victim of its own increasing popularity: ‘The underlying causes of this decline were the adoption of Indian civilization by an increasingly large number of natives who incorporated into it more and more of their original customs, and the gradual disappearance of a refined aristocracy, the guardian of Sanskrit culture.’³⁸

总之，十五世纪越南将其影响力扩展到占婆，永久吞并了印度支那南部；大约在同一时期，缅甸的掸族和暹罗的泰族等山地民族建立了新的王国，取代了蒲甘和吴哥的旧势力。然而，泰族在建立新都时，还是忍不住将其命名为阿瑜陀耶（Ayutthaya），以直接致敬印度教英雄罗摩的居所阿约提亚（Ayodhya）。

In any event, in the fifteenth century Vietnam expanded its influence into Champa, annexing permanently the south of Indo-China; and about the same time groups of mountain peoples, the Shan in Burma, and the Thai in Siam, established new kingdoms that thrust aside the old powers of Pagan and Angkor. Nonetheless, when founding their new capital, the Thai could not help calling it Ayutthaya, in direct tribute to the Hindu hero Rama’s residence, Ayodhya.

梵语由佛教传播：中亚和东亚

Sanskrit carried by Buddhism: Central and eastern Asia

到目前为止，我们主要将梵语视为印度教的载体。而且似乎在东南亚，梵语最初也主要传达了这一信息。公元五世纪初，法显经东印度群岛的叶波提（Yava-dvīpa）返回中国时曾说：“此地异端和婆罗门盛行，佛法却鲜为人知。” ³⁹

So far we have largely spoken of Sanskrit as a vehicle of Hinduism. And it seems that for the most part this is what it conveyed at first in South-East Asia. Fa-Xian, returning to China via Ye-po-ti (Yava-dvīpa) in the East Indies in the early fifth century AD, remarked: ‘in this country heretics and Brahmans flourish, but the law of Buddha is not much known’.³⁹

时至今日，印度教在爪哇岛以东的巴厘岛仍然存在。然而，在东南亚其他地区，情况已截然不同，印度教早已被佛教所取代。这是两种信仰之间漫长而复杂的教义之争的结果，尽管这场争论并非特别血腥。印度教与统治王朝的密切联系最终在王朝覆灭后对其自身不利。但佛教内部也存在竞争，包括密宗（原意为“织机”或“框架”）、大乘（意为“大乘”）和上座部（意为“长老的教义”）。上座部佛教凭借与斯里兰卡僧伽罗人的联系，最终在东南亚取得了胜利。然而，所有这些斗争都是在印度传统学术体系未受挑战的背景下发生的。

To this day, Hinduism survives on the island of Bali, east of Java. However, elsewhere in South-East Asia the picture is now very different, Hinduism long ago replaced by Buddhism. This is the result of a long and complex, though not especially bloody, history of doctrinal contests between the two faiths. Hindu cults’ close associations with ruling dynasties ultimately worked against them, when those dynasties fell. But there was also competition among strains of Buddhism, Tantra, originally ‘the loom’ or ‘the framework’, Mahāyāna, ‘the great vehicle’ and Theravāda, ‘the docrine of the elders’. Theravada, buttressed by links with the Sinhala in Śri Lanka, ultimately triumphed in South-East Asia. Nevertheless, all these struggles took place against an unchallenged background of Indian learning.

事实上，佛教传教士几乎是在第一批印度海盗和商人之后不久，甚至可能与他们同时抵达。锡兰史书记载，公元前三世纪，阿育王派遣两位僧侣苏阿和乌塔拉前往苏瓦阿布米（Suva abhūmi）。 ⁴⁰尽管东南亚（今缅甸和泰国一带）最早的佛教活动考古记录可以追溯到公元五世纪。印度教历来更易吸引国王和统治精英，但对于在印度教种姓制度中饱受压迫的下层阶级——首陀罗和贱民——而言，却并非自愿。相比之下，佛教强调个人追求觉悟的平等主义，原则上更具普世性。在印度人早期进军该地区时，这两种宗教很可能都存在；它们互补的魅力或许起到了相互支持的作用，同时也向外来者推广了印度文化。

Buddhist missionaries actually came very soon after the first Indian buccaneers and traders, if not along with them. Ceylonese chronicles tell of Aśoka sending two monks, Soa and Uttara, to Suvaabhūmi in the third century BC,⁴⁰ although the first archaeological records of Buddhist activity in South-East Asia (in the areas of modern Burma and Thailand) are from the fifth century AD. Hinduism was always a religion likely to appeal to kings and a ruling elite, but not voluntarily to the lower orders, the Śudras and outcastes, who are singularly downtrodden in the Hindu caste system; by contrast, Buddhism, with its egalitarian emphasis on personal quest for enlightenment, could in principle appeal much more widely. It seems likely that in the early days of Indian advance into the region both religions were represented; their complementary charms may even have served to back each other up, while promoting Indian culture among outsiders.

宗教差异始终与语言息息相关：印度教徒偏爱古典梵语，而佛教徒则更喜欢与其密切相关但更为简朴的巴利语。随着时间的推移，巴利语也逐渐被古梵语形式所包裹，最终形成了独特的佛教混合梵语风格。古典梵语的真正学术造诣和创造力在印度教地区，例如占婆、柬埔寨、爪哇和巴厘岛，往往最为突出。

The religious distinction always had some linguistic implications, the Hindus favouring classical Sanskrit, while the Buddhists preferred the closely related but somewhat simpler Pali. As time wore on, there was also a tendency for Pali to be reclothed in archaic Sanskrit forms, giving rise to the particular style of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. Real learning, and creativity, in classical Sanskrit tended to be at its best in the Hindu areas, such as Champa, Cambodia, Java and Bali.

尽管佛陀最初敦促弟子们摒弃严格的语言规范，用任何方言（梵语：sakayā niruttiya）来传播教义，但佛教经典在东南亚仍然以巴利语流传。与中国和西藏不同，东南亚并没有大力推广将经典翻译成当地语言。巴利语逐渐成为一种秘传的礼仪语言，鲜为人知，但似乎并未对佛教的传播产生不利影响。

Despite the Buddha’s original urgings to his disciples to leave behind strict linguistic codes and work in any vernacular (sakayā niruttiyā) in order to get the message across, the Buddhist scriptures remained in Pali in South-East Asia, where—in contrast with China and Tibet—there was no major effort to translate them into local languages. Pali became an esoteric liturgical language, unknown to the general population, but apparently without adverse effects on the spread of Buddhism.

也没有任何相反的趋势，即巴利语或某种形式的梵语被用作佛教仪式和辩论之外的日常交流语言。巴利语没有世俗文学，即使名义上讲述佛陀前世故事的《本生经》与《伊索寓言》或其印度版本《五卷书》等其他故事书颇为相似。在东南亚，巴利语作为一种宗教仪式语言仍然存在，但当地的方言与它毫无关联：缅甸语、泰语、高棉语、亚齐语、马来语和爪哇语都与巴利语无关，尽管它们大量借用了印度语言的词汇。

Nor was there any converse tendency to have Pali, or some form of Sanskrit, taken up as a language of general communication outside Buddhist liturgy and debate. There is no secular literature in Pali, even if the Jātaka tales, which nominally recount the past lives of the Buddha, are rather like such other story books as Aesop’s Fables, or its Indian equivalent, the Pañcatantra. And in South-East Asia, where Pali survives as a liturgical language, the local vernacular has nothing to do with it: Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Acehnese, Malay and Javanese are all unrelated to Pali, heavy as they are with loans from the Indian languages.

从印度向北、向东，佛教展现出非凡的吸引力，因此巴利语和梵语在这些广袤的地区广为人知。但它们始终仅限于宗教仪式语言。因此，佛教对语言的影响远不及基督教或伊斯兰教。毕竟，西方基督教的语言拉丁语，在同一时期（公元500-1500年），为欧洲寺院乃至大学中通用语言的发展奠定了基础。伊斯兰教将阿拉伯语传播到北非、阿拉伯半岛、巴勒斯坦和美索不达米亚，并一直延续至今，既作为受过教育者的国际通用语保持原貌，又以地方变体为基础，发展出许多地方方言。佛教徒的日常用语中，却没有形成类似的语言统一性。

Buddhism has proved a faith of remarkable attractiveness from India outward to the north and east, and so Pali and Sanskrit are extremely well known in these vast areas. But they have remained no more than liturgical languages. As a result, Buddhism’s linguistic effects have been far weaker than those of Christianity or Islam. After all, Latin, the language of Western Christianity, provided the foundation for the growth of a common language in the monasteries and then the universities of Europe in this same period (AD 500-1500). Islam propagated Arabic all round North Africa, Arabia, Palestine and Mesopotamia, persisting up to the present day, both in unchanged form as an international lingua franca for the educated and, with local variations, as the basis of many vernaculars. There is no comparable linguistic union of Buddhists, in their daily languages.

至于梵语在这段历史中是如何被使用的，我们知之甚少。在印度教中，吠陀经音韵本身所蕴含的美德早已与理解其含义的必要性分离。如今，对于佛教徒而言，尽管梵语不再被广泛理解，但它仍然在吟诵和仪式中被广泛使用，其内容和音韵开始被赋予一种神秘的价值。对许多人来说，梵语成为了一种咒语（mantra）和“ma ala ” （意为“圆圈、神圣图式”）的语言。在中世纪的日本，重复念诵“namu amida butsu” （ “nam amitabha Buddha”的变体，意为“顶礼您，光辉灿烂的觉悟者”）被认为是死后进入净土的可靠途径。时至今日，数百万藏人仍在吟诵“om ma i padme hum ”（意为“莲花中的宝石”），这句源自密宗佛教的神秘短语，其最初的性意象如今已被遗忘。

As for how the language was used in this part of Sanskrit’s story, there is little to say. In Hinduism, the virtue implicit in the very sound of the Vedas had long since been separated from any need to understand their meaning. Now once again for the Buddhists, with the language no longer widely understood, but still widely heard in chants and ceremonial, its substance and sound began to be given a mystic value of their own. Sanskrit became for many a language of mantra, ‘incantation’ and maala, ‘circle, sacred diagram’. In medieval Japan, repeating namu amida butsu, a version of nama Amitabha Buddha, ‘Bowing to you, O Resplendent Enlightened One’, was the infallible means of reaching the Pure Land after death. And to this day millions of Tibetans chant om mai padme hum, ‘Hail the jewel in the lotus’, a mystical phrase from Tantric Buddhism, its original sexual imagery now quite forgotten.

更务实地说，与梵语书写和分析相关的技术和系统为其他语言的读写能力奠定了基础。这样一来，即使神圣的语言无法直接用于人与人之间的交流，它们仍然可以继续启发地方方言的发展。

More pragmatically, the technology and systems associated with writing and analysing Sanskrit provided the basis for literacy in other languages. In this way, sacred languages, unavailable for direct communication among people, could still go on inspiring developments in the local vernaculars.

梵文的出现，在中国被称为“梵文”（梵文意为“婆罗门文字”），在日本被称为“梵语”（梵语意为“婆罗门语”），对东亚地区使用的汉字书写系统影响甚微，因为这种书写系统在中国已经发展了一千多年：相反，在这些国家的佛教实践中，汉字经常被用来（尽管只是音译）表示梵文本身。

The advent of Sanskrit, known as fànwén, ‘Brahman writing’, in China, bongo, ‘Brahman talk’, in Japan, had only a small effect on the character-based system of writing in use in East Asia, since this had already been well established in China for over a millennium: rather, Chinese characters are often used (though only phonetically) to represent Sanskrit itself in the Buddhist practice of these countries.

它确实对汉语语音产生了影响。唐代（七至八世纪）的中国学者了解梵文字母传统，能够识别汉字的首辅音，并称之为“字母”，显然是源于梵语“母”（māt kā），意为“母性的”，而“母”本身也是一个字母。这些字母被用来系统化字典中标注发音的传统做法：汉语字典一直以来都采用“方格”的方式，将一个汉字与另外两个汉字连接起来，其中一个汉字的首辅音相同，另一个汉字的声调和韵律也相同。将这些信息整理成系统图表，在语言学理解方面只是迈出了非常初步的一步，因为当时并没有对韵律部分进行更深入的分析（例如，将其分解为元音和辅音）。 ⁴¹

One effect it did have was on Chinese phonetics. Chinese scholars of the Tang period (seventh to eighth centuries), knowing the Sanskrit alphabetic tradition could identify the initial consonants of characters, called them zìmŭ, ‘word mothers’, apparently after the Sanskrit term mātkā, ‘maternal’, which is also a letter of the alphabet. These were used to systematise the traditional practice for indicating pronunciation in dictionaries: Chinese dictionaries have always done this by what is called fànqiě, linking a character with two others, one with the same initial consonant, and the other with the same tone and rhyme. Putting this into a systematic chart was a very modest step in linguistic understanding, since no further analysis of the rhyme part (for example, into vowels and consonants) was undertaken.⁴¹

在亚洲这片广袤地区使用的另一种文字系统中，也存在着一个有趣的现象。^*日本的音节文字，即所谓的假名（或称五十音），其符号顺序源自印度字母的顺序。梵文字母的顺序通常是……

There is also an interesting curiosity in one of the other writing systems used in this vast area of Asia.^* Japan owes the order of symbols in its syllabary, the so-called kana, or go-jū-on, ‘fifty sounds’, to the order of letters in Indian alphabets. The order of Sanskrit letters is conventionally

这并非像我们的ABCD那样随意排列…… ^†而是基于所代表声音的各种纯粹语音特性。例如，所有辅音的排列顺序都遵循舌尖接触口腔后部逐渐向前推进的原则。鼻辅音（m、n等）总是紧随其他发音部位相同的辅音之后。元音的特殊顺序部分源于梵语中大多数e和o实际上源自双元音ai和au，因此与它们的长元音āi和āu归为一类更为恰当。

This is not an arbitrary order like our ABCD… ^† Rather it appeals to various purely phonetic properties of the sounds represented. So, for example, all the consonants are placed in an order where tongue contact gradually advances from the back to the front of the mouth cavity. And the nasal consonants (m, n, etc.) always come immediately after the other consonants formed at the same place of articulation. The strange order of the vowels is partly conditioned by the fact that most instances of e and o in Sanskrit actually derive from the diphthongs ai and au, and so are well classified next to their long equivalents āi and āu.

如今，日语假名代表的是音节，而不是单个辅音。它们的读音在过去一千年里肯定发生了变化，但根据目前可追溯到的最古老的读音，我们可以将传统的音序表述为：

Now the Japanese kana represent syllables, rather than individual consonants. Their pronunciation has definitely changed over the last millennium, but using the most ancient pronunciation reconstructible, we can state the conventional order as:

我们立即注意到，日语元音的任意顺序（aiueo）与梵语完全相同，尽管这在日语语法中并无依据。此外，尽管日语辅音的数量远少于梵语，但它们的排列顺序几乎与梵语字母表完全一致。事实上，只有一个明显的例外，即s，它出现在本应是c或的位置，而不是像梵语咝音那样位于末尾。实际上，有理由相信，在确定这种约定俗成的顺序时，这个音素的发音实际上是[š]（英语的“sh”）或[t ^s ]，这意味着它最接近梵语的c（英语的“ch”，[tš]）。

Immediately we note that the arbitrary order of the vowels (a i u e o) is precisely as in Sanskrit, although this has no motivation in Japanese grammar. Furthermore, although there are many fewer consonants in Japanese than in Sanskrit, they occur in almost exactly the same order as in the Sanskrit alphabet. In fact, there is only one apparent exception, s, which occurs where c or should be, not at the end like the Sanskrit sibilants. In fact there is reason to believe that the pronunciation of this phoneme was actually [š] (English ‘sh’) or [t^s], when the conventional order was set up, which means it would be closest to Sanskrit c (English ‘ch’, [tš]).

这种从根本上对文字系统的彻底借鉴表明，不仅佛教吟诵的声音，而且传统语言分析的要素也随着梵语传播到了日本。

This thoroughgoing intellectual borrowing at the root of the writing system demonstrates that not just the sound of the Buddhist chants but also elements of the traditional analysis of the language had spread to Japan with Sanskrit.

梵语对文字技术影响的另一个例子是藏文，藏文最早出现于公元8世纪，直接源自悉达文。已知最早的藏文使用记录是拉萨附近若尔的一根石柱，其年代可追溯至公元764年。 ⁴²

Another example of Sanskrit intellectual influence on the technology of writing is the Tibetan script, which we first see in use in the eighth century AD, derived directly from the Siddha script. The earliest-known use of it is on a stone pillar at Žol near Lhasa, dated to 764.⁴²

西藏的识字率究竟是源于佛教，还是源于行政现代化尝试，目前尚不完全清楚。现存最早的碑文年代，恰好是佛教传入西藏的时期，僧侣桑塔拉克·伊塔（Śāntarak ita）将佛教带到了西藏。然而，在佐尔石柱碑文中却只字未提佛教，该碑文记录的是一位皇家大臣的功绩。 ⁴³

It is not quite clear if Tibet owes its literacy to Buddhism, or to attempts to modernise administration. The era of the first surviving inscriptions is precisely the time when Buddhism first came to Tibet, with the monk Śāntarakita. But there is no mention of Buddhism on the Žol pillar inscription, which is a record of a royal minister’s achievements.⁴³

无论出于何种动机，很明显，藏文字母受到了印度字母的启发，而印度字母原本是用来书写梵文的。

Whatever the motivation, it is clear that the Tibetan alphabet was inspired by an Indian model, and one that was used for the writing of Sanskrit or

俗语（Prakrit）和藏文（Prakrit）一旦确立，便主要用于翻译梵文或巴利文的佛教经典。翻译业发展如此庞大，以至于九世纪初西藏皇家委员会专门制定了精确的对应规则（类似于当今某些工业翻译中使用的“规范语言”）。其结果是翻译中展现的文学技巧有所下降，但由于翻译工作极其严谨，我们常常能够仅凭藏文译本就重构出已佚失的梵文原文。

Prakrit. And Tibetan writing, once established, was very largely taken up with the translation of Buddhist classics from Sanskrit or Pali. This became such an industry that there was a Tibetan royal commission in the early ninth century to establish precise rules for equivalences (comparable to the ‘controlled language’ used in some industrial translation today). The result was a lowering of the literary skill displayed in translation, but such punctilious work was done that it is often possible to reconstruct lost Sanskrit originals simply on the basis of their Tibetan versions.

西藏梵语文化的这些宗教基础在十三世纪被更为广泛的古典文学体系所超越，因为当时的穆斯林入侵者摧毁了北印度所有的高等学府，许多学者带着他们的书籍逃往北方的西藏。1206年，九位梵语学者随释迦牟尼跋陀罗前往西藏。五十年后，印度学者拉克米卡拉与藏族学者舍敦·若杰·姆斯坦在梵语戏剧、诗歌和诗学方面展开了合作。⁴⁴

These religious foundations of Tibet’s Sanskrit culture were surmounted by a superstructure of wider-ranging classical literature in the thirteenth century, for then Muslim invaders devastated all the centres of higher learning in northern India, and many scholars fled northward into Tibet with their books. Nine Sanskrit pundits accompanied the Khatšhe pantšhen Śākyašrībhadra to Tibet in 1206, and fifty years later there was collaboration on Sanskrit drama, poetry and poetics between the Indian pundit Lakmīkara and the Tibetan scholar šo-ston Rdo-rdže rgyal msthan.⁴⁴

想到八百年前西藏是逃离印度北部劫掠成性的异教徒的佛教徒的避难所，这多少让人感到欣慰——这与我们二十世纪后半叶所了解的情况截然相反。

It is somehow reassuring to think that eight hundred years ago Tibet was a refuge for Buddhists fleeing from marauding infidels in northern India—the precise opposite of what we have known in the latter part of the twentieth century.

梵语取代了

Sanskrit supplanted

穆斯林的入侵始于十世纪末阿富汗的加兹尼。穆斯林的“德里苏丹国”用了三百年时间才控制了从印度河到恒河的整个平原，又过了一个世纪才征服了次大陆的大部分地区。他们的统一并未长久，但他们在印度的存在仍然举足轻重，尤其是在1505年之后，巴布尔率领另一支军队从阿富汗南下，建立了莫卧儿帝国。

Muslim invasions had started from Ghazni in Afghanistan in the late tenth century. It took three hundred years for the Muslims’ ‘Delhi Sultanate’ to take control of the whole plain from Indus to Ganges, and another century to grasp most of the rest of the subcontinent. Their unity was not sustained, but their presence in India continued to count, especially after 1505, when Babur, leading yet another army down from Afghanistan, founded the Mughal empire.

印度人称这些外来者为“突厥人”（ Turu ka）。他们带来了一种自信的新文明，他们用一种东突厥语（察合台语）交谈，用阿拉伯语祈祷，但最重要的是精通波斯语。

The incomers were known to the Indians as Turuka (’Turks’). They brought in a new self-confident civilisation that conversed in a form of eastern Turkic (Chagatay), prayed in Arabic, but was literate above all in Persian.

他们的文化自信，他们完全不同的礼仪行为和人生观，尤其是他们用波斯语建立的完善的行政体系，意味着他们对语言的影响远远超过了之前来自同一方向的非教条式入侵者——沙迦人、贵霜人和胡阿人。现在，梵语第一次被取代，失去了印度精英语言的地位。

Their cultural self-confidence, their totally alien concepts of decorous behaviour and the point of life, and above all their developed systems of administration conducted in Persian, meant that they had far, far more linguistic effect than the previous, non-doctrinal, incursions from the same direction of the Śaka, Kushāna and Hūa. Now for the first time Sanskrit was supplanted as the elite language of India.

具有讽刺意味的是，穆斯林入侵非洲大陆的成功很大程度上归功于他们精湛的骑兵作战技巧，以及他们带来的阿富汗良驹。公元前两千年雅利安骑兵入侵者的远古后裔，最终在他们曾经擅长的领域败下阵来。

Ironically, the Muslims’ success in invading the continent was largely a result of their skill with cavalry, and the fine Afghan-bred horses that they brought with them. The distant descendants of the Aryan horse-borne invaders of the second millennium BC had at last been beaten at what had once been their own game.

大约在同一时期，东南亚一些曾经使用梵语的文明也接受了同一种新宗教，但显然是出于截然不同的动机。

At about the same time, some of the civilisations of South-East Asia that had been Sanskrit-speaking were taking up the same new religion, but apparently for quite different motives.

这里没有发生军事征服，也没有有利于低种姓的社会革命。然而，苏门答腊北部的一些港口在十三世纪末至十四世纪初皈依了伊斯兰教，而位于马来半岛的最重要的贸易中心马六甲（马六甲城）也在十五世纪初皈依了伊斯兰教。^*该宗教在其贸易伙伴中广泛传播，尤其是在爪哇岛、南苏拉威西岛、摩鹿加群岛和棉兰老岛。人们推测，这种影响来自印度的穆斯林商人，或许是一种商业多米诺骨牌效应，各个王国都认为只有皈依伊斯兰教才能维持与印度的联系——或者，也可能是为了应对葡萄牙人到来之前伊斯兰教徒急于传教的局面。 ⁴⁵无论其联系如何，这种新的宗教创造了一种新的社会氛围，并终结了梵语作为此地文化代表语言的统治地位。

There was no military conquest here, nor social revolution in favour of lower castes. Nevertheless, some ports in northern Sumatra became Muslim in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and Melaka (Malacca), the most important trading centre, situated on the Malay peninsula, embraced Islam some time in the early fifteenth.^* The religion spread widely among its trading partners, notably to Java, south Sulawesi, the Moluccas and Mindanao. It is presumed that the influence came from Muslim traders out of India, perhaps in a kind of commercial domino effect, with kingdom after kingdom reckoning that they stood to maintain their Indian links only if they took up the faith—or perhaps responding to a desperate Islamic rush to proselytise before the arrival of the Portuguese.⁴⁵ Whatever the linkage, the new religion created a new social climate, and put an end to Sanskrit’s reign as the representative language of culture here.

梵语的魅力

The charm of Sanskrit

梵语魅力的根源

The roots of Sanskrit’s charm

keyūrā na vibhū ayanti puru am hārā na candrojjvalā na snana na vilepana na kusuma nāla k tā mūrdhana bhā āikā samala karoti puru am yā sa sk tā dhāryate k īyante khalu bhū a ani satata vāgbhū a a bhū ā am

keyūrā na vibhūayanti puruām hārā na candrojjvalā na snāna na vilepana na kusuma nālaktā mūrdhana bhāāikā samalakaroti puruam yā sasktā dhāryate kīyante khalu bhūaāni satata vāgbhūaa bhūāam

手镯不能为人增添光彩，如月光般璀璨的项链也不能；沐浴、化妆品、花环、头饰，都无济于事。人真正能增添光彩的，唯有语言的精妙修养：华丽的服饰终将消逝，唯有优美的语言永存。

Bracelets do not embellish man, nor necklaces bright as the moon; bathing, cosmetics, garland, head-dress, none can add a whit. Man’s one true embellishment is language kept perfected: finery must perish, but eternal the refinement of fine language.

Bhart hari，ii. 17-20

Bharthari, ii. 17-20

一种起源于印欧语系分支的语言，在世界一个相对宁静的角落——兴都库什山脉的山麓地带——扎根，随后作为一种通用语遍布印度-恒河平原，并随着印度教的传播，成为印度次大陆其他地区的精英语言。之后，它通过贸易向东跨越海洋，并在长达一千年的时间里，成为整个次大陆和群岛的文化灵感源泉。这就是梵语的自主发展历程。

A language that began as an Indo-European offshoot settled in a decidedly quiet corner of the world, the foothills of the Hindu Kush, spread as a vernacular all over the Indo-Gangetic plain, and as an elite language, borne by Hindu religion, to the rest of the Indian subcontinent. From there it spread eastward across the sea through trade, and became for a thousand years the cultural inspiration to a whole new subcontinent and archipelago. This was the autonomous growth of Sanskrit.

但有一种宗教起源于梵语的第一个千年，并在第二个和第三个千年继续发展壮大：佛教最初随着梵语和俗语在印度和印度支那传播开来。随后，佛教展现出超越其发源地——印度文化——的能力。它向北传播，最终向东传播，赢得了众多信徒，并在中国、朝鲜、日本、西藏和蒙古社会蓬勃发展。尽管佛教在传播过程中不断演变，但梵语和巴利语却几乎未发生显著变化，作为佛教高等学问的辅助工具，伴随佛教走向世界各地。这便是梵语的搭车之旅，是它承载着佛教各种形式的载体。

But one of the religions that had started in Sanskrit’s first millennium continued to grow through its second and third: Buddhism spread first with Sanskrit and the Prakrits across India and Indo-China. Then the religion showed that it could transcend its native state, its home in Indian culture. Moving northward and finally eastward, it won converts and flourished in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Tibetan and Mongolian societies. Although the religion metamorphosed as it progressed across the world, Sanskrit and Pali travelled with it without significant change, as adjuncts to Buddhist higher learning wherever it took them. This was Sanskrit’s free ride, its vehicle Buddhism in all its many forms.

现在是时候思考梵语的哪些特质使其发展壮大，以及佛教本身是否可能从这种极具魅力的语言形式中受益了。

It is now time to consider what it was about Sanskrit which made it grow, and whether Buddhism itself may have owed something to this consummately charming form of human expression.

梵语拥有诸多优势。它是婆罗门和刹帝利这两个自觉的精英阶层的语言，他们认为自己有权统治与他们接触的其他民族，并且拥有实现这一目标的技术手段。此外，他们的语言是他们文化认知的核心，因为语法是他们科学的女王。精通梵语被视为文明生活的标志，是雅利安人（ārya）在世界上的地位的象征，而且梵语是可以教授的，并且也确实被教授过。

Sanskrit had many advantages. It was the language of a self-conscious elite, the Brahmans and Kshatriyas, who considered themselves entitled to dominate other peoples with whom they came into contact, and had the technical means to do so. Furthermore, their language was at the very centre of their own picture of their culture, since grammar was the queen of their sciences. Facility in Sanskrit was seen as the hallmark of civilised existence, of one’s place in the world as an ārya, but it was also something that was teachable, and was taught.

几个世纪以来，人们对这种知识的真正价值的看法逐渐发生了变化，从需要保障对神的崇拜，到维护社会秩序，再到提升文化鉴赏的品质。

Beliefs about the true value of this knowledge gradually changed over the centuries, from the need to guarantee the cult of the gods, to maintenance of the social order, and then to enhancement of the patina of cultural appreciation.

尽管某些社会力量在世俗层面（例如阿育王等君主的实践）和精神层面（例如佛陀的态度）都推动了语言的非精英化形式，但它们逐渐败给了自诩为“完美语言”（梵文：sa sk tā bhā ā）的精致而自觉的魅力：由于其对自身详尽的描述和分析，它总能证明何为最佳以及为何最佳。因此，它对那些寻求向上流动的机构具有不可抗拒的吸引力：例如，寻求在印度获得更广泛认可的印度教王国（如鲁陀罗陀曼王国），寻求证明自身合法性的印度支那王朝（如沙连陀罗王朝），以及希望提升其经典威望的佛教宗派。

Although some social forces promoted less elite forms of the language, both at a secular level (for example, in the practice of kings such as Aśoka) and in the spiritual world (for example, in the attitudes of the Buddha), they gradually lost out to the cultivated, self-conscious charm of the self-styled Perfected Language, sasktā bhāā: because of its elaborated descriptions and analyses of itself, it could always demonstrate what was best and why it was best. It thereby made itself irresistibly attractive to upwardly mobile institutions: Hindu kingdoms (such as that of Rudradaman) seeking wider recognition in India, Indo-Chinese dynasties (such as the Śailendra of Bnam) seeking to demonstrate their legitimacy, Buddhist schools wanting to endow their devotional texts with prestige.

制度的天然保守性意味着其象征符号往往会僵化——佛教徒使用巴利语就是一个例证，巴利语最初是作为一种通俗易懂的通用语而尝试使用的，最终却沦为另一种古典语言。印度，尤其是其种姓制度，堪称保守制度的摇篮。这种保守主义总是对梵语有利：梵语通过其自身的经文被捍卫为永恒不变的语言标准，任何偏离都意味着衰落和堕落。

The natural conservatism of institutions meant that their symbols would tend to ossify—witness the fate of the Pali language among the Buddhists, starting as an attempt at an unstuffy people’s lingua franca but ending up as just another classical language. India, with its caste system, was nothing if not a home of conservative institutions. Such conservatism always played into the hands of Sanskrit: it was defended through its own sutras as the unchanging linguistic standard, from which any change would mean decline and degradation.

由于梵语在语法书中有着明确的定义，因此极易学习：事实上，可以说，正因为其标准如此明确（即便复杂深奥），才鼓励人们展现出律师般的智慧，尽管这种智慧始终处于一种奇特的非实用领域，脱离了通常的惩罚、财产和军事力量等实际需求。尽管梵语语法辩论常常引发激烈争论（现在依然如此），但从未发生过基于辩论结果的战争。语法分析（Vyākāra）为智力锻炼和辩论提供了一个天然的平台，其关注点仅仅在于确立语言世界中的正确之道，或者说如何才能最好地形式化语言。正如谚语所说：

Being concretely defined in the grammar books, Sanskrit was eminently learnable: indeed, it could be held that since the standard was so explicit, if complex and abstruse, it encouraged explicit displays of lawyer-like intelligence, though always in a strangely impractical realm divorced from the usual imperatives of penalties, property and military force. There were no wars based on the results of its debates, hotly disputed though they often were (and are). Vyākāraa, grammatical analysis, provided a natural forum for intellectual exercise and argument, simply concerned with the establishment of what was right in the world of language, or how it should best be formalised. As the saying had it:

ardhamātralāghavena putrotsavam iva Manyante vāiyākāra ā

ardhamātrālāghavena putrotsavam iva manyante vāiyākāraā

语法学家们为节省半个量词而欢欣鼓舞，如同为喜得贵子一般。

The grammarians rejoice at the saving of half a measure as at the birth of a son.

其结果是，婆罗门教的技能永远不会沦为单纯的死记硬背和规定，因为它们建立在严谨的理论结构之上。

One result was that Brahmanical skills could never decline into mere rote learning and stipulation, since they were based in a rigorously articulated intellectual structure.

正如语言学一样，印度各科学领域亦是如此。梵语文明与其西方的希腊和罗马文明不同，它不断诉诸抽象原则，而非自身特定的文化传统。印度文化并非围绕其史诗和文学经典展开，尽管这些作品备受珍视。其哲学也不强调政治、伦理或说服艺术等具有社会实用性的理论。相反，它探讨的是存在状态和感知模式。从某种意义上说，梵语理论未能与现实世界建立联系。正如巴沙姆所指出的：

As in linguistics, so in the gamut of Indian sciences. In its continual appeal to abstract principle, rather than its own specific cultural tradition, Sanskrit-based civilisation is different from those of Greece and Rome to its west. Indian culture does not revolve around its epics and its literary classics, treasured though these are. Nor does its philosophy emphasise socially useful theories, such as politics, ethics or the art of persuasion. Rather it theorises about states of being and modes of perception. There is a certain sense in which Sanskrit theory fails to connect with the practical world. As Basham points out:

……当时学者的地理知识极其模糊。即使在印度境内，文献中对距离和方向的描述也通常非常模糊不清。那些率领军队征战千里、往返于印度各地的商人，以及从喜马拉雅山脉到科摩林角朝圣的朝圣者，必然对印度地理有着扎实的实践知识；而那些从索科特拉岛航行到广州的航海家，其地理知识的掌握必然更为广泛；然而，当时的文献中却鲜有提及这些知识^。46

… the geographical knowledge of the learned was of the vaguest description. Even within India distances and directions, as given in texts, are usually very vague and inaccurate. The conquerors who led their armies thousands of miles on their campaigns, the merchants who carried their wares from one end of India to the other, and the pilgrims who visited sacred places from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin must have had a sound practical knowledge of Indian geography, while that of the seamen who sailed the ocean from Socotra to Canton must have been even wider; but there are few echoes of this knowledge in the literature of the time.⁴⁶

梵语超越地域界限和个人细节，追求超凡脱俗的境界，在印度文明中获得了近乎通用语言的地位，至今仍享有如此地位。尽管在印度部分地区，仍有人坚持否认梵语，强调其起源于北方的地方语言。梵语的“妹妹”巴利语也享有类似的地位，但仅限于佛教徒，且主要在印度以外的地区使用。这两种语言在印度乃至亚洲的普遍地位的一个标志是，与其他印度和印度支那的语言不同，它们可以使用所有源自婆罗米文的文字书写：因此，在印度语境中，它们是“全球本土语言”，无论使用何种方言，都能自如地表达其神圣的含义。

Ethereal in its interests, above local loyalties and personal detail, Sanskrit achieved, and still enjoys, a status within Indian civilisation as a quasi-universal language, even if there are now persistent voices in parts of India who would disown it, and emphasise its origins as a local language of the north. Pali, its younger sister, has enjoyed something of the same status, though only among Buddhists, and mostly outside India itself. One sign of these two languages’ pan-Indian, almost pan-Asian, status is the fact that, unlike all the other languages of India and Indo-China, they are written indifferently in all the different scripts that have descended from Brahmi: they are thus ‘globally local’ in the Indic context, at home as a holy language whatever the vernacular.

但对于古典语言而言，无论采用何种文字，它们对书写的存在始终抱有一种奇特的漠不关心。我们已经注意到印度文化中对文字的固有不信任。事实上，这种不信任不仅适用于这些雅利安语系语言，而且更为普遍：实际上，印度最早的圣典是锡克教的《古鲁·格兰特·萨希卜》，成书于十七世纪。（而锡克教明确地将伊斯兰教及其对《古兰经》经文的崇敬奉为重要的灵感来源。）

But for classical languages, they have always been strangely indifferent to a written existence, in whatever script. We have noted the characteristic distrust of writing in Indian culture. This in fact applies not just to these Aryan languages, but more generally: in fact, the first sacred written text anywhere in India is the Sikhs’ Guru Granth Sahib, produced in the seventeenth century. (And Sikhism explicitly takes Islam, with its adoration of the written text of the Koran, as a major inspiration.)

这种对口口相传的文本的重视，或许正是梵语得以广泛流传的原因，它既是祈祷和虔诚的语言，也是古代文学作品的语言。举例来说，一首广为流传的地方赞美诗《vande utkalā jananī》（我向奥里萨母亲致敬）实际上是用梵语写成的，尽管吟唱者往往对此浑然不觉。

This greater esteem for texts preserved and transmitted orally has probably kept Sanskrit accessible to a wide public, a language of prayers and devotion, as well as a language of ancient works of literature. To pick one example, a popular local hymn, vande utkalā jananī, ‘I salute, O mother Orissa’, is in fact expressed in Sanskrit, although those who sing it hardly notice.

与此同时，梵语通过两种媒介得以保存：一种是直接以手稿形式记录下来，另一种是通过梵语语法学家的口头传承。这或许使得梵语的发音在其三千多年的宗教仪式生活中没有发生显著变化^。

Meanwhile the fact that it was preserved by two media, straightforwardly written down in a manuscript tradition, as well as distinctively through the oral tradition of the Sanskrit grammarians, may have prevented the pronunciation of Sanskrit from changing markedly over the three thousand and more years of its liturgical life.^*

这个故事的一方面就像希伯来语的存续：一种建立在用一种早已无人使用的语言诵读经文之上的神圣传统，使这种语言得以基本完整地保存下来。但另一方面，这世上再无其他：仿佛希伯来语的数值计算法（gematria）——它为字母赋予数值，并将这些数值相加，从而为短语赋予具有神秘意义的数字^——在一系列方程式中定义了一种表示整个希伯来语的替代方法，从而在完全独立于《托拉》和《塔木德》记载的情况下，保存了希伯来语的语法和发音。

One side of this story is like the survival of Hebrew: a holy tradition, built on recitation of texts in a language that no one spoke any longer, has preserved the language more or less intact. But the other side is like nothing else on earth: it is as if the Hebrew tradition of gematria, which assigned numerical values to letters and by so adding them gave mystically significant numbers to phrases, ^† had defined, in a set of equations, an alternative means of representing the whole Hebrew language, so preserving its grammar and pronunciation quite independently of what was written in the Torah and Talmud.

尽管如此，梵语及其所代表的印度文化对外人的吸引力仍然难以捉摸。我曾就此询问过我的印度朋友，指出孟族、蒙达族或蒙古族人似乎都异常乐于接受雅利安文化、语言和宗教，只要没有受到强迫。他们指出，皈依者几乎无需承担任何义务，无论是接受新的习俗还是抛弃旧有的生活方式。虽然会向神灵献祭，但作为印度教或佛教信徒的明确职责却寥寥无几。印度教似乎能够包容所有其他信仰：旧的信仰可以被简单地融入其中，正如扶南的创世神话所展现的那样。大乘佛教与印度教一样包容，其视野涵盖了永恒的宇宙和诸神。其他佛教流派则朝着完全不同的方向发展，注重伦理和个人觉悟的指导，但并未触及旧有的信仰和忠诚。

For all this, the attractiveness to outsiders of Sanskrit and the Indian culture it expressed remains elusive. I have questioned Indian friends about it, pointing out the apparently unreasonable readiness of Mon, Munda or Mongolian to accept Aryan culture, language and religion when presented to them without coercion. They point out how little was asked of converts, either to take up as new observance or to cast aside from their old ways. Offerings are made to deities, but explicit duties as an adherent of Hinduism or Buddhism are few. Hinduism can apparently find a place within it for all other faiths: old allegiances can simply be incorporated, as in the foundation myth of Funan. Mahayana Buddhism was as accommodating as Hinduism, with an eternity of universes and gods in its purview. Other forms of Buddhism were oriented in a completely different direction, giving guidance on ethics and personal enlightenment, but leaving old beliefs and allegiances undisturbed.

但这仅仅是因为没有遇到障碍：它并不能解释为什么在如此多的不同背景下，人们选择效仿印度模式，而不是固守旧习。毫无疑问，接受以梵语传承的新文化的决定，往往是由精英阶层做出的，然后通过强制或引导的方式推广到更广泛的人群。而皈依佛教的决定，或许更多时候是个人自主做出的。但无论这一决定是在哪个层面做出的，决策者们都一定感到自己正迈向一个更广阔、更开放的世界——打开通往他们所设想的印度和西方世界的财富，以及其古老而精深的智慧的大门。

But this is purely the absence of an obstacle: it does not explain why in so many different contexts people have chosen to follow the Indian example rather than stick with their old ways. The decision to adopt the new culture transmitted in Sanskrit was no doubt often made by members of an elite, then enforced or induced in a wider population. The decision to adopt Buddhism may more often have been for individuals to make. But at whatever level the decision was made, the decision-makers must have felt they were taking a step towards a wider, more open world—opening links to the surmised wealth of India and the Western world, and to its ancient and elaborate wisdom.

这项决定并非一劳永逸，也并非预见到它将给印度支那、中国乃至整个东方带来根本性的变革。但总的来说，无论在何处做出的决定，都得以保留。而且，无论是在最初，还是在后来的岁月里，当印度人和皈依者彼此熟知之后，都没有任何军事动机，这表明文化融合在某种程度上被认为是有价值的，值得追求和发展。

The decision will not have been taken once and for all, nor with any prescience of the fundamental changes in Indo-China, China and the East that it would bring about. But by and large the decision, wherever taken, stuck. And the absence of any military inducement, either at the outset, or in the later years or centuries when both Indians and the converts were well aware each of the other, argues that the cultural assimilation was recognised somehow as good value, and well worth pursuing and developing.

限制弱点

Limiting weaknesses

然而，梵语所代表的人类世界并非没有缺点，也并非没有缺点。

And yet the human world of Sanskrit was not, and is not, without its disadvantages.

在军事上，它从未建立起强大的防御中心，而是倾向于依赖天然屏障，但这些屏障却时常被来自西北的入侵者突破。在社会上，它依然保守且等级森严，更倾向于探讨为何封闭僵化的社会才是最佳选择，而非发挥自身才能在军事、政治或经济领域进行创新。在宗教方面，印度教和佛教倾向于构建一种超脱尘世的价值体系，从而削弱了对忠诚和社会凝聚力的实际考量，并加剧了其在防御和灵活性方面的根本弱点。

Militarily, it never created a strong defensible centre, tending to rely rather on natural barriers, which were periodically breached by invaders from the north-west. Socially, it remained conservative and stratified, preferring to theorise about why it was best for society to be closed and rigid, rather than to use its talents to innovate, militarily, politically or economically. In religion, Hinduism and Buddhism tended to create an other-worldly system of values, so undercutting practical concerns for loyalty and social cohesion, and compounding the fundamental weaknesses in defence and flexibility.

所有这些问题都隐含在梵语社群之中。藤蔓蔓延开来颇为迷人，但随着时间的推移，它往往会变成极其复杂且相当顽固的枝条纠缠。最终，它会被冷酷无情的人修剪掉。

All these problems were implicit in the Sanskrit community. The creeper spread charmingly, but in time it tended to harden into an extremely intricate, and fairly unyielding, tangle of branches. In time, it would be pruned by unsympathetic hands.

我们首先从战争、外交和政府领域谈起。

We begin with the domains of war, diplomacy and government.

我们从铭文记录中得知，梵语最初是一种神圣语言，直到公元二世纪中叶才确立其作为政治声明的对外语言的地位，这比语法学家帕尼尼确立其语法规范晚了650年。在此之前，政府语言似乎是统治城市的通用语，特别是华氏城邦的摩揭陀土语：在帕尼尼之后250年，当阿育王在印度北部和中部各地建造纪念碑时，这些纪念碑就是用摩揭陀土语写成的。然而，也有一些证据表明，梵语当时已经渗透到国家的最高层：印度治国之道的伟大著作——考底利耶的《政事论》——就是用梵语而非摩揭陀语写成的。传统上认为此文出自旃陀罗笈多·孔雀王朝（阿育王的祖父，意为“月之秘密”）的首席大臣之手。旃陀罗笈多在亚历山大短暂入侵印度河后不久便建立了北印度帝国。但此文也可能写于公元150年之前的五个世纪中的任何时期。到那时，梵文在政治记录中的主导地位无疑已得到确立。 ⁴⁷

We have seen (from the record of inscriptions) that Sanskrit, at first a sacred language, established itself as the outward language for political statements only in the middle of the second century AD, 650 years after the grammarian Panini had established its canon. Previously, it appears that the language of government was the common speech of the ruling city, notably the Magadhi Prakrit of Pataliputra: 250 years after Panini, when Aśoka had set monuments all over north and central India, they were written in this Magadhi Prakrit. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that Sanskrit had already penetrated to the highest levels in the state: the great handbook of Indian statecraft, the Arthaśāstra of Kautilya, is written in Sanskrit, not Magadhi. This is traditionally attributed to the chief minister of Candragupta (’Moonsecret’) Maurya, Aśoka’s grandfather, who had established his northern Indian empire shortly after Alexander’s brief foray along the Indus, but it could have been written at any time in the five centuries to AD 150. By then, certainly, the primacy of Sanskrit in political records was assured.⁴⁷

尽管梵语象征着文化上的统一，但印度在建立一个能够保卫边境、确保超过六代（最多）的有序继承的大型政治实体方面，远不如西方的罗马和波斯，也不如东方的中国那样成功。从公元前五世纪到公元五世纪，诸如难陀王朝、孔雀王朝、巽伽王朝、萨塔瓦哈纳王朝和笈多王朝等本土王朝兴衰更迭，其都城通常位于华氏城（巴特那），但却缺乏直接的继承制度：这些规模较大的帝国通常会在几代人的时间里陷入分散的封建混战，之后才会出现下一位“转轮王”（cakravārtin），即统一的君主。有时，来自西北方向的大规模入侵甚至会到达华氏城（巴特那），例如雅瓦那王朝的国王（如佛教的弥兰陀王米南德）从斯瓦特地区南下，或者公元1至2世纪，说巴克特里亚语的伊朗人迦腻色迦建立贵霜帝国。但这些入侵从未持续更久。^*

Regardless of the cultural unity signalled by Sanskrit, India was not nearly as successful as Rome and Persia to the west, or China to the east, in establishing a large-scale political unit that could defend its borders and secure orderly succession beyond a half-dozen generations at most. From the fifth century BC to the fifth century AD, indigenous dynasties such as the Nandas, Mauryas, Shungas, Satavahanas and Guptas rose and fell with a persistent rhythm, their capital often at Pataliputra, but with no sense of direct succession: usually these larger empires collapsed into a couple of generations of decentralised feudal melee, before the next would-be cakravārtin, ‘wheel-turner’, i.e. universal monarch, emerged. Sometimes major incursions from the north-west would get as far as Pataliputra, for example when the Yavana kings (such as Menander—Buddhism’s Milinda) swooped down from Swat, or when Kanishka, a Bactrian-speaking Iranian, founded the Kushāna empire, in the first to second centuries AD. But they never lasted any longer.^*

这一时期的所有入侵者——包括讲伊朗语的斯基泰人（Śaka）和讲突厥语的匈奴人（Hū a）——都遵循着蒙古人入侵中国或日耳曼部落入侵西欧的模式。他们没有建立自己的文化，而是在最初的掠夺之后，简单地吸收了当地的文化，并作为新的贵族阶层定居下来，没有留下任何持久的语言影响。梵语和普拉克里特语就这样传承给了新一代和新的民族。尽管这一传统在政治上并不统一，但《政事论》（Arthaśāstra）表明，它在法律和经济方面都具有高度的组织性和自觉性。

All the invaders in this period—they also included Scythians (Śaka) speaking Iranian, and Xiongnu (Hūa) speaking Turkic—conformed to the pattern of Mongols in China or Germanic tribes in western Europe. They did not establish their own cultures, but after a first period of rapine simply adopted the existing culture and settled down as the new aristocracy, with no lasting linguistic effects. Sanskrit, and the Prakrits, were thus transmitted to new generations and new peoples. The tradition was not politically unified, though the Arthaśāstra shows that it was highly organised and self-conscious, legally and economically.

这一时期并没有明显的技术或军事创新，通讯也一定很困难，这两个原因解释了为什么各个城市和地区保持了如此大的独立性，而cakravārtin的中央集权在很大程度上只是一个未实现的梦想。

There was no apparent technical or military innovation in this period, and communications must have remained difficult, two reasons which explain why the various cities and regions retained so much independence, with the centralised power of the cakravārtin largely an unrealised dream.

《政事论》对外交政策有着详尽的理论，暗示着当时存在着众多小国。大多数国家是君主制，但实际上也存在一些共和国，由有影响力的人物组成的议会统治。据说，居住在恒河北岸吠舍离的离车族拥有7707位国王，他们都是部落议会的成员。佛陀本人就成长于这样一个社群，距离喜马拉雅山麓的释迦族不远。据说，这一传统启发了僧伽（佛教僧侣的全体团体）显著的民主实践。

The Arthaśāstra has an elaborate theory of foreign policy, implying a large number of smallish states. Most of the states were monarchies, but there were in fact also republics, ruled by councils of men of substance. The Licchavi, living in Vaiśalī north of the Ganges, are said to have had 7,707 rājās or ‘kings’, all in the tribal assembly. The Buddha himself had grown up in one such community, not far away among the Śākya of the Himalayan foothills. This tradition is said to have inspired the noticeably democratic practice of the sangha, the full community of Buddhist monks.

至于印度社会的局限性，必须将其视为一种等级森严的社会结构，一个人的种姓，进而其社会地位，完全由出身决定。梵语理论家们通常援引吠陀经，毫不费力地为这种公然的不平等现象辩护和开脱——即便有时，一些出身低种姓的天然领袖会毫不顾忌地登上王位，而几乎无视印度教的禁忌。女性的地位也同样不容置疑，梵语词汇“ satī”最初只是一个形容词的阴性形式，意为“真实、正确、美好”，后来却被理解为最恰当地用来指自愿在丈夫的葬礼柴堆上被焚烧的妻子。

As for the social limitations of Indian society, it must be seen as overwhelmingly stratified, with one’s caste, and hence status, determined by birth. Sanskrit-speaking theorists, usually referring back to the Vedas, had no difficulty in justifying and rationalising flagrant inequalities—even if, from time to time, natural leaders who happened to be low-caste made themselves into kings without too much scruple over Hinduism’s taboos. The status of women was also not a matter for discussion, with the Sanskrit word satī, originally just the feminine of the adjective meaning ‘true, correct, good’, coming to be understood as best applied to a wife willingly burnt on her husband’s funeral pyre.

本土思想对瓦解种姓制度僵化的真正贡献在于佛教。这一时期发展起来的两种佛教流派都体现了这一点。早期的小乘佛教鼓励任何人追求个人觉悟，尽管他们必须放弃世俗生活，成为僧侣或尼姑。小乘佛教早期也赋予女性在追求冥想生活方面平等，或至少与之相当的地位。后期的大乘佛教则不那么严苛，更注重日常生活。它允许信徒与菩萨等圣人建立个人联系，其更为强烈的社会伦理，以及普遍的慈悲和利他主义，也极具吸引力。

The real contribution of indigenous thought to subverting the rigidities of the caste system was Buddhism. This was true in both the variants that developed in this period. The earlier Hīnayāna tradition encouraged anyone to seek their own enlightenment, though they would have to give up the world as monks or nuns in order to do it. Early on, it also gave women equal, or at least comparable, status in pursuing a contemplative life. The later Mahāyāna was less austere, more a religion for everyday life. It allowed believers to develop a personal relationship with the holy figures of bodhisattvas, and its much stronger social ethic, of general compassion and altruism, was also attractive.

不同信仰之间似乎并没有太多的宗教不容忍或暴力事件。人们的厌恶之情，似乎更多是出于吹毛求疵或迷信，而非出于虔诚。在当时创作的梵文戏剧和爱情故事中，偶遇僧侣可能被视为不祥之兆。与此同时，佛教徒也因其严谨的学术精神和高尚的品格而声名鹊起。

There does not seem to have been much religious intolerance or violence as between the different faiths. Where people felt aversion, it seems to have been more fastidious or superstitious than based on piety. In the Sanskrit dramas and romances being written at the time, a chance meeting with a monk may be viewed as a sign of bad luck to come. In this same period, the Buddhists were building up a formidable reputation for intellectual rigour as well as high-mindedness.

那烂陀大寺（Nālandā Mahāvihāra）位于巴特那以南，步行数日即可到达，是佛教学习的最高殿堂。公元前3世纪，阿育王在佛陀生前喜爱的修行之地创建了这座核心寺院。在其存在期间，所有主要的王朝都对其进行了重建和扩建，使其成为重要的学术中心：公元5世纪的笈多王朝、公元7世纪的戒日王、公元9世纪的波罗王朝。除了大乘经典和十八小乘经典之外，教授的科目还包括梵文语法（śabdavidyā ）、逻辑学和形而上学（hetuvidyā ）、医学（cikitsavidyā ）、工艺学（ śilpasthānavidyā，字面意思是“技术”，包括力学、阴阳学和历法），显然也包括吠陀经，以及通常被理解为世俗文学的“杂学”。玄奘曾在七世纪在此求学，后又在此任教，他对这所学府的描述与现代精英大学非常相似：

The Great Monastery of Nalanda (Nālandā Mahāvihāra), a couple of days’ walk south of Pataliputra, was the supreme monument to Buddhist learning. Aśoka founded the core monastery on the site of a favourite haunt of the Buddha in the third century BC, and all the major dynasties that flourished during its lifespan re-endowed and rebuilt it as a seat of learning: the Guptas in the fifth century, King Harsha in the seventh, the Pālas in the ninth. Besides the scriptures of the Mahayana, and the eighteen sects of the Hinayana, subjects taught included śabdavidyā (Sanskrit grammar), hetuvidyā (logic and metaphysics), cikitsavidyā (medicine), śilpasthānavidyā (literally ‘technology’, including mechanics, yin and yang, and the calendar), apparently also the Vedas, and ‘miscellaneous studies’, generally understood as secular literature. Xuan-Zang, who was enrolled as a student and later a teacher there in the seventh century, describes the institution in terms very reminiscent of a modern elite university:

这些祭司人数达数千人，个个才华横溢、能力超群。他们如今声名显赫，数百人的名声已迅速传遍远方……

The priests to the number of several thousands are men of the highest ability and talent. Their distinction is very great at the present time, and there are many hundreds whose fame has rapidly spread through distant regions…

从早到晚，他们都在进行辩论；老少互助。那些无法讨论《三部经》之外问题的人，地位低下，羞愧难当，只能躲藏起来。因此，来自不同城市的学者，为了在辩论中迅速获得声誉，纷纷前来求知，他们的智慧之流也随之远播四方。正因如此，有些人冒充那烂陀学生，往返于此，因此备受尊崇。如果外地人想要进入并参与辩论，守门人会提出一些难题；许多人无法回答，只能退场。想要入学，必须精通古今典籍。因此，那些以陌生人身份前来的学生，必须通过艰苦的辩论来证明自己的能力；失败者与成功者相比，差距大约是七八比十^。48

From morning till night they engage in discussion; the old and the young mutually help one another. Those who cannot discuss questions out of the Tripiaka are little esteemed, and are obliged to hide themselves for shame. Learned men from different cities, on this account, who desire to acquire quickly a renown in discussion, come here in multitudes to settle their doubts, and then the streams of their wisdom spread far and wide. For this reason some persons usurp the name of Nalanda students, and in going to and fro receive honour in consequence. If men of other quarters desire to enter and take part in the discussions, the keeper of the gate proposes some hard questions; many are unable to answer and retire. One must have studied deeply both old and new books before getting admission. Those students, therefore, who come here as strangers, have to show their ability by hard discussion; those who fail compared with those who succeed are as 7 or 8 to 10.⁴⁸

尽管新作品层出不穷，或者至少有对旧作品的评注，但这种大规模的知识力量集中（如同同时代欧洲和伊斯兰世界的思想家一样）本质上是保守的：他们的目标是维护宗教和哲学的现状，尽管他们可能会用新的论据来捍卫它^。

Although there was continuous production of new works, or at least commentaries on old ones, such large-scale concentrations of intellectual fire-power (like their contemporaries in Europe and the Islamic world) were profoundly conservative: they aimed at sustaining the religious and philosophical status quo, although they might defend it with new arguments.^*

最终，大寺院未能使佛教在印度得以延续。早在玄奘时代，佛教信徒就已开始流失。自十世纪起，佛教逐渐被印度教吸收，仿佛它只是另一个教派，佛陀也被巧妙地重塑为毗湿奴在人间的化身，与印度教英雄罗摩和克里希纳并驾齐驱。这堵住了种姓制度的漏洞，使低种姓和贱民再次沦为低人一等。当穆斯林开始入侵时，他们中的许多人或许会成为积极的听众，聆听他们宣扬人人平等的教义。

The mahāvihāras did not in the end sustain Buddhism in India. Buddhism was already losing adherents in the time of Xuan-Zang. From the tenth century it was gradually absorbed by Hinduism, as if it were just another sect, the Buddha having been imaginatively recast as an earthly manifestation of Vishnu, on a par with Hindu heroes Rama and Krishna. This closed the loophole in the caste system, and left the lower castes and untouchables con demned again to inferiority. Many of them would have provided eager listeners when Muslims began to invade, bringing news of a world where all were equal before God.

十二世纪末，当这些入侵者最终席卷北印度并洗劫其宝藏时，大寺院也未能幸免。梵语依然魅力不减，但如同许多拥有这种美德的事物一样，它无力抵御那些无法欣赏它的人。

The mahāvihāras were not spared when these invaders finally overran northern India and sacked its treasures at the end of the twelfth century. Sanskrit retained its charms, but like many with this virtue it was unable to defend itself bodily against those unable to appreciate them.

agrāhyā murdhaje v etā striyo gu asamanvitā na latah pallavacchedam arhanty upavanodbhuvā

agrāhyā mūrdhajev etā striyo guasamanvitā na latāh pallavacchedam arhanty upavanodbhuvā

像她们这样有才华的女士，不应该被人揪头发。

Ladies like these, who are accomplished, should not be seized by the hair;

生长在果园里的藤蔓植物不应该被剪掉叶子。

for creepers growing in orchards deserve not to have their foliage lopped off.

Śūdraka，《小泥车》，8.21

Śūdraka, The Little Clay Cart, 8.21

梵语不再孤单

Sanskrit no longer alone

穆斯林入侵之后，印度变成了一个截然不同的地方。

After the Muslim invasions, India became a very different place.

现在很难想象，为了塑造我们今天所熟悉的印度，日常生活和根深蒂固的价值观中，究竟有哪些截然相反、严重冲突的极端情况需要调和。

It is hard now to conceive what opposite and harshly conflicting extremes, both of daily life and of values deeply held, had to be reconciled to create the India now familiar to us.

印度人一直认为自己是世界的中心，神灵主宰着一切，社会秩序复杂却又不可动摇，因为这是最高层所制定的。就连像佛陀那样严谨的分析家也称最高道路为雅利安之道。在理智上，他们知道自己并非孤身一人，但他们看待外国人的唯一角色，就是将他们视为局外人，认为他们最大的希望在于分享印度所能提供的福祉，无论是通过贸易还是收养。他们衣着简朴，以适应当地的气候，但也会根据自己的收入和种姓，尽可能地华丽打扮自己。除了节日之外，他们与神灵的关系主要是一种个人的虔诚。他们建造纪念碑时，一丝不苟地注重细节，并饰以精美的插图和装饰。他们的宗教坦诚地接纳生活和自然的方方面面，认为毁灭与创造同等重要，并且公开承认性在一切之中占据核心地位。

Indians had perceived themselves as being firmly at the centre of their world, their gods running it, their social order complex but immutable, because ordained at the highest level. Even as austere an analyst as the Buddha had called the highest path the Arya way. Intellectually, they knew that they were not alone in the world, but the only role in which they had seen foreigners was as outsiders whose best hope was to partake in the blessings that India could provide, whether by trade or by adoption. They dressed scantily, as was comfortable in their climate, but adorned themselves as gaudily as their incomes and caste allowed. Their relations with their gods were largely a matter of personal devotion, except at festival time. They built their monuments with loving attention to intricate detail, and lavish illustration and decoration. Their religions were frank in acceptance of all aspects of life and nature, with destruction on a par with creation, and sexuality openly acknowledged as central to all.

他们的统治者如今是外邦人，带着异己且毫不妥协的观念。他们坚信只有一位神，祂主宰着整个世界，而偶像崇拜者只有悔改或死刑的可能。他们相信所有人在神面前灵性平等，都应该公开集体地敬拜祂。他们的着装风格是全身遮盖，他们认为这是谦逊的体现。他们的建筑风格简朴，他们认为任何图像或雕塑都等同于亵渎神明。他们对世界运行的理解是简朴而抽象的：性在创造中毫无作用，女性（以及与她们相关的欢愉）应该被妥善地隐藏在面纱之下。

Their rulers were now foreigners with an alien, and uncompromising, vision. They were firm believers that there was but one god, of universal dominion, and that idol-worshippers were fit only for conversion or death. They believed that all men were spiritually equal before God, and that they should worship him, publicly and en masse. Their style of dress was to cover the body fully, and they believed that modesty required this. Their buildings were austere, and they believed that any graphic or sculptural illustration was tantamount to blasphemy. Their idea of the workings of the world was austere and abstract: sex had no part in creation, and females (and the delights associated with them) should be kept decently out of sight in purdah.

大约在第二个千年的中期，这两个截然相反的群体之间达成了一种妥协，或者至少是一种共存之道。

Somehow, around the middle of the second millennium, a compromise, or at least a modus vivendi, was reached between these polar opposites.

从语言学角度来看，这种影响在印度目前使用人数最多、分布最广的单一语言中显而易见，尤其是在北部地区。这种语言有两个名称：印地语和乌尔都语，因为人们认为它是两种不同的语言。印地语使用天城文书写，这种独特的文字源于婆罗米文，形似晾衣绳，并且印地语喜欢借用梵语词汇。乌尔都语使用波斯文（源自阿拉伯文）书写，并吸收了波斯语和阿拉伯语的词汇。乌尔都语是巴基斯坦的官方语言，而印地语和乌尔都语在印度宪法中均被列为官方语言。

Linguistically, the effects of this are visible in the largest and most widespread single language now spoken in India, especially in its northern regions. It goes under two names, Hindi and Urdu, because it is felt to be two different languages. Hindi is written in Devanagari, the characteristic ‘washing on the line’ script derived from the Brahmi tradition, and likes to borrow words from Sanskrit. Urdu is written in Persian (by origin Arabic) script, and draws on Persian and Arabic. Urdu is the official language of the state of Pakistan, while both Hindi and Urdu are dignified as official languages in the Indian constitution.

但印地语和乌尔都语在词汇来源上都无法真正忠实地遵循各自的文化理想，实际上，当人们使用它们时，印地语和乌尔都语几乎成了同一种语言。^*这种表面上保持区别实则并无本质区别的现象，雄辩地反映了穆斯林入侵后印度文明的现状：双方都认为自己维护着自身的标准，但实际上却遵循着一个更广泛的共同规范，正是这个规范将他们团结在一个共同的社会中。

But neither can really run true to its cultural ideal in sourcing its vocabulary, and when they are spoken Hindi and Urdu are in practice one language.^*This maintenance of a distinction without a difference speaks eloquently for Indian civilisation after the Muslim invasions, each side believing it maintains its own standard, but in fact conforming to a common, wider, norm, which unites them in a common society.

尽管图鲁卡人坚定地维护着伊斯兰教的理想，并熟练地使用波斯语，这种习惯一直延续到19世纪英国殖民者彻底取代莫卧儿王朝之后，但最终他们还是落入了征服者采用被征服者语言的旧模式。如果说印地语和乌尔都语的名称源于其波斯语传承，那么它的实质却几乎完全是雅利安语，其基本词汇以及动词、形容词和名词的词尾都可追溯到类似梵语的语言，尽管经过了大幅简化。从历史上看，它显然是德里周边地区使用的普拉克里特语的延续，这种语言先后被称为Śauraseni （ “Śura-sena的语言”，指德里南部地区的语言）、Apabhramśa（“脱落的”）和Kha i Bol i（“站立的语言”）。

Despite their determined maintenance of Islamic ideals—along with educated use of Persian, which lasted until the British imperialists had fully taken over from the Mughals, well into the nineteenth century—the invading Turuka have ultimately fallen into the old pattern of invading conquerors adopting the speech of the conquered. For if the names Hindi and Urdu come from the Persian side of the language’s heritage, its substance turns out to be pretty much pure Aryan, with the basic vocabulary, and the endings on verbs, adjectives and nouns, all traceable to something like Sanskrit, though radically simplified. Historically, it is evidently the continuation of the Prakrit spoken round Delhi, known successively as Śauraseni (’language of Śura-sena’, the region to the south of the city), Apabhramśa (’falling off) and Khai Bol i (’standing speech’).

梵语的衰落，使其不再被视为语言学上的唯一标杆，却以一种截然不同且出人意料的方式，丰富了全世界对语言的理解。新的穆斯林统治者，尽管精通阿拉伯语、波斯语和土耳其语，却并未在语言学方面展现出卓越的成就。然而，当英国在十八世纪取得胜利后，一个同样自信的新兴文明开始了解印度文化，并通过印度文化接触到梵语。他们以欧洲古典语言——希腊语和拉丁语——的知识视角来审视梵语，并很快发现它与这两种语言有着惊人的相似之处。1786年，印度首席大法官威廉·琼斯爵士大胆推测，这三种语言“可能源自某个共同的源头，而这个源头或许已经不复存在”。

In a quite different and unexpected way, the fall of Sanskrit into a world where it was no longer seen as the sole standard of linguistic excellence came to enrich the whole world’s understanding of language. The new Muslim masters, despite their independent knowledge of Arabic, Persian and Turkish, did not distinguish themselves for their linguistic scholarship. But when the British succeeded in the eighteenth century, a new and equally confident alien civilisation became acquainted with Indian culture, and through it with Sanskrit. They approached it from the new perspective of knowledge of the classical languages of Europe, Greek and Latin, and were soon struck by its remarkable similarity to both of them. Sir William Jones, Chief Justice in India, ventured in 1786 the wild surmise that they were all three ‘sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists’.

这就是历史比较语言学的起源。将其应用于世界各地的语言研究，是十九世纪和二十世纪最伟大的学术探索之一；也正因如此，我们现在对人类语言的演变，乃至人类历史的进程，在文字出现之前就已有所了解。仅举三例，我们正是通过这种方法得知匈牙利人来自西伯利亚北部，马达加斯加是由婆罗洲殖民者建立的，而欧洲的吉普赛人则起源于遥远的印度。

This was the origin of historical comparative linguistics. Applying it to languages all over the world was one of the great intellectual adventures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and as a direct result we now know much of the flow of human languages, and so of human history, well before the start of the written documents. To give just three examples, this is how we know that the Hungarians came from northern Siberia, that Madagascar was colonised from Borneo, and that the European Gypsies originated as far away as India.

尽管梵语在语言学方面拥有卓越的传统，但它不可能独自朝着这个新方向发展：它需要与其他语言进行碰撞，这些语言远远超出了印度人的认知范围，而且它还需要能够将这些语言视为与梵语同等重要，而这对于梵语传统来说是完全不可想象的。

For all the self-generated excellence of Sanskrit’s own tradition in linguistics, it could never have gone off in this new direction on its own: what was needed was confrontation with other languages, far beyond the Indian ken, but also the ability to view these languages as somehow on a par with Sanskrit, something else that the tradition would have found simply inconceivable.

梵语此后的历史与其说是新的辉煌，不如说是生存史。在印度，它仍然是传统精英的语言，但如今它已失去了其在古代和中世纪作为印度主要知识话语载体的地位。如今，这些话语要么用主要的方言进行，要么更多地用英语进行。梵语文化始终建立在一种对其自身重要性的盲目自信之上，这种自信认为印度是世界上唯一重要的组成部分；它无法适应一个即使在印度国内这种观点也已被摒弃的世界。曾经，受印度影响的整个东亚和南亚都对印度给予了高度评价，但如今已不再如此。

Sanskrit’s subsequent history is one of survival, rather than new triumphs. In India it is still the language of a traditional elite, but now it is denied its ancient and medieval role as the principal vehicle of intellectual discourse in India. That is conducted either in the principal vernacular languages, or much more in English. Sanskrit’s culture was always based on a disarming view of its own importance, which held India to be the only significant part of the world; it has not adapted to a world where even in India itself this view is dismissed. The world touched by Indians, the whole of East and South Asia, once took India at its own valuation, but not any more.

或许它本可以实现必要的观念革命，从而吸收西方知识。直到十九世纪初，英国东印度公司，如同之前的莫卧儿王朝一样，一直赞助他们所发现的印度学术，包括阿拉伯语/波斯语和梵语。1823年，一个公共教育委员会成立，每年拨款10万卢比用于“复兴和改进文学，鼓励印度本土居民，以及向英属印度领土居民介绍和推广科学知识”。然而，委员会内部就这笔资金应该用于传统学术还是用于以英语进行的现代研究，争论了十年之久。最终，委员会选择了英语，这标志着文化上的彻底决裂。此后，印度传统与维多利亚时代迅速发展的科学、思想和技术之间，再也没有人认真尝试弥合二者之间的鸿沟，而正是这些科学、思想和技术创造了现代世界。梵语越来越成为某些宗教、某些文化、某些哲学的象征——它对人文主义者来说很有吸引力，但在科学界却不知何故毫无竞争力^。

Perhaps it could still have achieved the revolution in viewpoint needed to incorporate Western learning. Until the early nineteenth century the English East India Company, like the Mughals before them, had patronised Indian learning as they found it, both Arabic/Persian and Sanskrit. When a Committee of Public Instruction was formed in 1823 to spend an annual sum of 100,000 rupees on ‘the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of the Natives of India and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British Territories in India’ they were split for a decade on whether this should go towards the traditional learning or on modern studies conducted in English. The decision ultimately came down in favour of English, a cultural clean break: and no serious attempt was made afterwards to bridge the gap between India’s tradition and the swiftly developing sciences, ideologies and technologies that created the modern world in the Victorian age. Sanskrit became more and more a symbol of certain religions, certain cultures, certain philosophies—of interest to humanists, but somehow offering no contest in the world of the scientists.^*

作为一种2500年前就已成文的语言，它至今仍享有令人艳羡的地位，并且除了新增词汇外，几乎没有发生过任何重大变化。1947年，它被正式列为印度的官方语言之一。在1971年的印度人口普查中，仍有20万人声称自己会说这种语言——尽管当时的印度人口已达4亿。

It continues to enjoy an enviable status for a language that was codified 2500 years ago, and has admitted no significant change except new words since. In 1947, it was adopted as one of India’s official languages, and 200,000 people still claimed to speak it in the Indian census of 1971—though out of a then population of 400 million.

颇具讽刺意味的是，梵语在二十世纪最后十年被赋予了新的象征意义，被经常执政的印度人民党（BJP）奉为印度教身份的象征。例如，1999年被宣布为印度的梵语年，并在新德里举办了由政府资助的“世界梵语大会”。这其中显然有些怪异。正如我们所见，除了在寺庙中用于祈祷和念诵梵文咒语之外，梵语的学习一直都是精英阶层的专属；而印度教严格的等级制度剥夺了低种姓的地位，长期以来促使他们放弃印度教，转而信奉完全平等的伊斯兰教。如今，这枚婆罗门知识分子的徽章却被当作一场民众运动的旗帜，这场运动以粗暴而简单的方式拆毁清真寺，以此来彰显印度教的权力。

In a final irony, it assumed a new symbolic value in the last decade of the twentieth century, adopted by the Bhāratiyā Janata, ‘Indian Community’ Party (BJP), which was often in government, as a totem of Hindu identity. So, for example, 1999 was declared a Sanskrit Year in India, and a government-funded ‘World Sanskrit Conference’ held in New Delhi. There is something decidedly bizarre in this. Outside its use for prayers and mantras in the temple, as we have seen, the study of Sanskrit has always been an elite pursuit; and Hinduism’s strict hierarchies, denying status to lower castes, have long encouraged them to desert it for the totally egalitarian Islam. Now this badge of Brahman intellectuals is paraded as the banner for a popular mass movement that demolishes mosques as a crass and simple assertion of Hindu power.

梵语的历史并未终结，尽管过去3500年来支撑其独特特征的印度式世界观或许已经消逝。然而，它与众多现代梵语分支在印度共存，并作为印度教和佛教两大世界宗教的圣语，继续传承着自身的地位。

Sanskrit’s career is not over, although the exclusively Indian world-view that has underlain its distinctive character over the past 3500 years probably is. Nonetheless, it coexists in India with a large family of modern daughter languages, and carries on in its own right as the sacred language of two world religions, Hinduism and Buddhism.

这是一种充满悖论的语言。或许从技术上讲，它已经消亡了，因为几乎没有婴儿会把它作为第一语言。然而，它却通过一种人为的死记硬背和语法分析系统继续传承给下一代，而这种系统竟然与自然习得的方式一样稳健可靠，而且更不容易发生改变。

It is a language of paradox. Perhaps it is technically extinct, since there can be few if any infants who pick it up as their first language. Yet it continues to be transmitted to the next generation by an artificial system of rote learning and grammatical analysis that has somehow proved as robust as the natural way—and far less liable to introduce change.

梵语一直是一种非常多样化的语言，但在它蓬勃发展的热带气候中，人们总是选择鼓励它繁茂生长。

Sanskrit has always been very much a garden variety of language, but in the tropical climate where it has flourished the gardeners have always chosen to encourage its luxuriant side.

Adhara kisalayaraga komalavi apānukāri āu bāhu kusumam iva lobhaniya yauvanam ange u sa naddham

adhara kisalayarāga komalaviapānukāriāu bāhu kusumam iva lobhanīya yauvanam angeu sanaddham

她的下唇宛如嫩叶般闪耀，她的手臂如同柔韧的茎秆。

Truly her lower lip glows like a tender leaf, her arms resemble flexible stalks.

青春如花般娇艳动人，容光焕发。

And youth, bewitching like a blossom, shines in all her lineaments.

卡利达萨 (Kālidāsa)，沙琨达拉 (Sakuntalā) 认可，i.21

Kālidāsa, Śākuntalā Recognized, i.21

^*这并非比喻，也不是对梵文语法的时代错置的解读，而是对帕尼尼体系中经文运作方式的直接描述。请看一条经文的应用：iko ya aci

^* This is not a metaphor, or anachronistic interpetation of Sanskrit grammar, but a straightforward description of the working of the sutras in Panini’s system. Consider the application of a single sutra: iko ya aci

构成该经文的三个词并非梵语本身的词汇，而是来自一种人为的元语言，该元语言简洁地指代语法中的其他经文。尽管如此，它们仍被视为辅音词干名词，具有所有格（-as）、主格（不带词尾）和方位格（-i）的规则词尾。（这里有一个略微复杂的情况，即浊音部分，词尾的-as，在语音上表现为-o。这是梵语连音的一个规则，而梵语本身就是语法中一个极其复杂的部分。）因此，该经文可以从功能上进行分析。

The three words that constitute the sutra are not words of Sanskrit itself, but of an artificial metalanguage that refers tersely to other sutras of the grammar. Nevertheless, they are treated as if they are consonant-stem nouns, with the regular ending for genitive (-as), nominative (a bare ending) and locative (-i). (There is a slight complication, in that both a voiced segment, a final -as, is realised phonetically as -o. This is a regular principle of liaison in Sanskrit, itself a highly complicated part of the grammar.) The sutra could therefore be analysed functionally as

在经文的语境中，这些情况具有特殊的解释，分别指语音规则的输入、输出和右侧语境。因此，该经文应理解为：

In the context of a sutra, these cases have special interpretation, referring respectively to the input, the output and the right-hand context of a phonological rule. The sutra is therefore to be understood as:

但这些奇异的词语本身指的是什么呢？它们应该被理解为另一套经文（称为《湿婆经》）的应用，这套经文起到定义梵语自然音韵分类系统的作用。其开篇如下：

But what is the reference of the strange words themselves? They are to be understood as applications of another set of sutras (known as the Śiva-sutras), which plays the role of a system for defining natural classes of sounds in Sanskrit. This begins:

梵语中没有大小写之分，也没有分号。但使用罗马字母的这种排版方式，仅仅是为了清晰地展示帕尼尼语法学习者通过实例所学到的内容，即此处的大写字母是控制字符。任何由小写字母 a 后跟控制字符 b 组成的词项，都表示以 a 开头、以 b 结尾的音素序列。例如，“aC”表示元音集合，“haT”表示除 1 以外的半元音集合。由此可见，所分析的经文正是对这条规则的简洁阐述：

There is no distinction between upper or lower case in Sanskrit, nor any semicolons. But the use of this Roman typographical convenience is simply to show explicitly what a student of Paninian grammar learns by example, namely that the letters here written in upper case are functioning as control characters. Any term consisting of one of the lower-case letters a followed by one of the control characters b denotes the sequence of phones starling with a and ending just before b. So, for example, ‘aC’ denotes the set of vowels, ‘haT’ the set of semi-vowels excluding 1. It can be seen then that the sutra being analysed is nothing less than a concise statement of the rule:

确实简洁，但应当记住，这种简洁之所以成为可能，是因为一些控制原则是理所当然的——例如括号中隐含的解释：前四个音素分别对应后四个音素，但这发生在环境中九个音素出现之前。帕尼尼之后的注释传统的部分任务，就是明确阐明经文正确解读所依据的辅助原则（ paribhā ā）的精确性质。

Terse, indeed, but it should be remembered that this level of concision is possible only because a number of controlling principles can be taken for granted—e.g. the interpretation implicit in the brackets: the first four phones map respectively on to the second four phones, but this occurs before any of the nine phones in the environment. Part of the task of the tradition of commentary which followed on from Panini was to make explicit the precise nature of the paribhāā (auxiliary principles) on which the correct interpretation of the sutras rests.

^{*对比最新版}《钱伯斯英语词典》中的约 215,000 个词条和最新版《牛津英语词典》中的超过 500,000 个词条。

^* Compare the 215,000 or so entries in the latest Chambers English Dictionary, and over 500,000 in the latest Oxford English Dictionary.

^*这是梵语中与希腊语barbaros完全对应的词，意为不会说梵语的人。

^* This is the precise Sanskrit equivalent of the Greek barbaros, defined as someone who did not speak Sanskrit.

^*奇怪的是，这种情况只发生在穆斯林入侵之后，而穆斯林入侵带来了完全陌生的波斯语，并将其作为新的精英语言。

^* Bizarrely this only happened after Muslim incursions, which had brought in the completely alien Persian as the new elite language.

^*确实，有一个关于国王萨塔瓦哈纳（Satavahana）的著名故事，讲述了他因梵语水平不如一位女士而造成的尴尬：在一次泼水大战中，他的一位王后恳求他停止用水（梵语为modakai，源自mā udakai，意为“不要用水”）泼她，但他却用糖果（梵语为modakai，意为“用糖果”）来回应。当王后指出他的错误时，他羞愧难当，卧床不起，然后开始速成学习语法（索玛德瓦，《故事集》，第6卷，第108-122页）。

^* Indeed, there is a famous story of the embarrassment caused when a king called Satavahana turned out to know less Sanskrit than a lady: in a water fight, one of his queens begged him to stop pelting her with water (modakai, from mā udakai, ‘not with-waters’), but he responded by showering her with sweets (modakai, ‘with sweets’). He was so mortified when she pointed out his mistake that he took to his bed, and then embarked on a crash course in grammar (Somadeva, Kathā-sarit-sāgaram, l.vi.108-22).

^{*通过比较该短语的梵语对应词：}sarvasatā mūlabhā ā，人们就能对巴利语与梵语的差异程度有所了解。

^* One gets some idea of how much, and how little, Pali differs from Sanskrit by comparing the Sanskrit equivalent for this phrase: sarvasatā mūlabhāā.

^他称之为“Fan”，可能是“婆罗门”一词的中文缩略形式。

^* He called it Fan, probably a Chinese reduction of the word Brahmana.

^*在印度这一地区，最广泛使用的字母表仍然被称为deva-nāgarī，即“神的城市[文字]”。

^* The most widely used alphabet in this area of India is still known as deva-nāgarī, ‘the gods’ urban [script]’.

^这两个词分别演变为“奴隶”和“恶魔、强盗、匪徒”。比较一下英语单词slave源自Slav和塞尔维亚语单词servus 的演变路径，两者似乎正好相反。dāsa的阴性形式dāsī演变为“妓女”（devadāsī，“神的奴隶女孩”，指的是寺庙妓女），而最常见的梵语侮辱词之一是dāsya putra，相当于“whoreson”或“狗娘养的”。

^* These two terms came to mean ‘slave’ and ‘demon, robber, bandit’ respectively. Compare the development of the English word slave from Slav, and the apparently opposite route taken by Serb from Latin servus. The feminine of dāsa, dāsī, came to mean ‘whore’ (devadāsī, ‘a god’s slave-girl’, was a temple prostitute), and one of the most routine Sanskrit insults is dāsya putra, equivalent to ‘whoreson’ or ‘son of a bitch’.

^*其目的是为了营救罗摩被绑架的妻子悉多——这与荷马笔下特洛伊战争的动机颇为相似，当时希腊舰队出发去营救墨涅拉俄斯的妻子海伦。

^* The purpose was to rescue Rama’s kidnapped wife Sita—rather similar to Homer’s motivation for the Trojan War, where a Greek fleet set out to rescue Menelaus’s wife Helen.

^*后来，印度教彻底改变了立场，甚至放弃了出国旅行的可能性。他们认为出国旅行会给高种姓带来无法消除的污秽，例如在十三世纪末赫马德里（Hemādri）的法律汇编（iii.2: 667）中。

^* In a total reversal, Hinduism was later to renounce even the possibility of foreign voyages. It was held to bring unassuageable impurity upon higher castes, e.g. in the late-thirteenth-century law digest by Hemādri (iii.2: 667).

^{北部使用梵文}天城体、古吉拉特语、旁遮普语、孟加拉语和奥里亚语；南部使用泰卢固语、卡纳达语、泰米尔语、马拉雅拉姆语和僧伽罗语。还有一种相关的字母，在更北的地区用于藏语。

^* Devanagari, Gujarati, Panjabi, Bengali, Oriya in the north; Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and Sinhalese in the south. There is another related alphabet, used farther north for Tibetan.

† 大陆地区主要使用缅甸语、老挝语、泰语、高棉语（柬埔寨语）；岛屿地区主要使用爪哇语、巴厘语、他加禄语（菲律宾）、巴塔克语（苏门答腊）和布吉斯语（苏拉威西）。

† Burmese, Lao, Thai, Khmer (Cambodian) on the mainland; in the islands, Javanese, Balinese, Tagalog (in the Philippines), Batak (in Sumatra) and Bugis (in Sulawesi)

。

^*同一个词现在发音为 Phnom，就像 Phnom Penh 中的 Phnom 一样。

^* The same word is now pronounced Phnom, as in Phnom Penh.

^†爪哇（ Java）、苏门答腊（Sumatra）和马来（Malaya）均源自梵语“Yava-dvīpa” （意为“大麦岛”）、“ samudra” （意为“海”）以及“Malaya” （实际上源自德拉维语“ malai ”，意为“山丘”，位于印度南部马拉巴尔附近）。柬埔寨（Kamboja）让人联想到开伯尔山口地区的坎布贾王国（Kambuja）；但其词源还有另一种说法，即“Kambu-ja” ，意为“坎布·斯瓦扬布瓦（Kambu Svāyambhūva ）之子” ，这位隐士与天女梅拉（Mera）结合，创立了高棉人（Khmers）的种族（Coedès 1968: 66）。占婆（Champa）与恒河下游的王国同名，但很可能是梵语形式的当地族名“Cham”。缅甸的伊洛瓦底江（River Irrawaddy）得名于旁遮普邦拉维河（Ravi）的古名“Irāvatī ”（意为“拥有饮用水”）。

^† Java, Sumatra and Malaya are derived from Yava-dvīpa, ‘barley island’; samudra, ‘sea’, and Malaya, actually from a Dravidian word, malai, ‘a hill’, in south India near Malabar. Cambodia (Kamboja) evokes Kambuja, a kingdom in the Khyber pass area; but had a competing etymology as Kambu-ja, i.e. born of Kambu Svāyambhūva, a hermit who united with the celestial nymph Mera to found the race of Khmers (Coedès 1968: 66). Champa shares its name with the kingdom of the lower Ganges, but is probably the local ethnonym Cham in Sanskrit form. The River Irrawaddy in Burma is named for the Irāvatī, ‘having drinking water’, the old name of the Ravi river in Panjab.

^*在某种程度上，这种情况仍在继续：因此，在撰写本文时，印度尼西亚总统梅加瓦蒂·苏加诺普特里的名字翻译过来就是“多云的仁慈之女”。

^* To an extent, this still continues: so Megawati Sukarnoputri, at the time of writing president of Indonesia, has a name that translates as ‘Cloudy, Beneficent’s Daughter’.

^*一种名为Siddha-māt ka（“固定字母”）或简称 Siddha 的变体，是东亚（即大乘）佛教传统中最普遍使用的文字版本。

^* A variant called Siddha-mātka, ‘settled alphabet’, or simply Siddha, is the version of the script most generally used in the East Asian (i.e. Mahayana) Buddhist traditions.

^†其动机纯粹是历史性的。最终可以追溯到腓尼基人所规定的同样任意的“aleph beth gimel daleth…”。

^† The motivation for this is purely historic. It ultimately goes back to an equally arbitrary ‘aleph beth gimel daleth…’ specified by the Phoenicians.

^*括号中的项目在拼写或语言中并不存在，这是由于语音原因造成的。

^* The items in parentheses do not exist separately, in the spelling or the language, for phonetic reasons.

^尽管如此，这种文字经过巧妙的修改，能够更有效地表示藏语中那些与婆罗米文及其所有后继文字所针对的雅利安语系语言截然不同的特征。值得注意的是，它能够区分以声门塞音开头的元音和不以声门塞音开头的元音。（在梵语中，如同英语一样，当元音出现在一个词的开头时，会自动插入一个声门塞音。）后来（13世纪），忽必烈汗的宫廷将这种文字借用到中国，创造了蒙古文的八思巴文，八思巴文甚至在1269年被宣布为帝国的官方文字。它也被用来书写汉语。（参见第四章“坚持使用一种书写系统”，第156页。）

^* Nevertheless, the script had been modified deftly to represent more effectively features of Tibetan which are alien to the Aryan languages for which Brahmi and all its successors had been designed. Notably, it can distinguish initial vowels that have glottal stops in front of them and those that do not. (In Sanskrit, as in English, a glottal jerk is inserted automatically when a vowel begins an utterance.) The script was later (in the thirteenth century) borrowed by the Chinese at the court of Kublai Khan, to create the ‘Phagspa script for Mongolian, this even being declared the official script of the empire in 1269. It was also used to write Chinese. (See Chapter 4, ‘Holding fast to a system of writing’, p. 156.)

^马六甲作为贸易中转站的地位，使马来语（Bahasa Mělayu）稳固地确立了其在该地区的通用语地位，这一地位一直延续至今。（参见第11章“荷兰入侵者”，第400页。）马六甲本身是苏门答腊岛的斯里维查亚（巨港）的殖民地，巨港也是一个重要的贸易中心。最早的马来语铭文（公元7世纪）就发现于此，其中一块铭文位于占碑城（Jambi，旧称Malayu）上游（Hall 1981: 47-8）。颇具讽刺意味的是，“Bahasa”一词正是梵语“bhāā ”，意为“语言”。

^* Malacca’s role as an entrepôt firmly established Malay, Bahasa Mělayu, as the lingua franca of the region, and this has lasted up to the present day. (See Chapter 11, ‘Dutch interlopers’, p. 400.) Malacca was itself a colony of šrī Vijaya (Palembang) on Sumatra, also a major trade centre, and that is where the earliest (seventh century) inscriptions in Malay have been found, one of them upriver from the city of Jambi, previously known as Malayu (Hall 1981: 47-8). Ironically enough, ’Bahasa’ is none other than the Sanskrit word bhāā, ‘language’.

^尽管我们知道，有些特征，例如声调重音和过长（pluti）元音的发音，在这个过程中已经消失了。

^* Although we know that some features, e.g. the tonal accent, and the pronunciation of over-long (pluti) vowels, have been lost along the way.

^†最著名的例子是 NRWN KSR（“尼禄皇帝”），其数字之和为 666，这是《启示录》中兽的数字。

^† Most famously NRWN KSR (’Nero Emperor’) added up to 666, the number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation.

^具有讽刺意味的是，迦腻色迦统治时期最持久的贡献是“沙迦纪年法”，这一纪年系统至今仍在印度使用。它从公元78年开始，甚至在东南亚的许多梵文铭文中也有使用。

^* Ironically, the most lasting contribution of Kanishka’s rule was ‘Shaka’ era, a dating system still in use in India. It runs from AD 78, and is even used in many of the Sanskrit inscriptions of South-East Asia.

^那烂陀寺的三大著名藏经阁——宝藏书阁（Ratnodadhi，意为“宝海”）、宝藏海（ Ratnasāgara，意为“宝海”）和宝藏书阁（ Ratnara jaka，意为“宝珠装饰的”）——都将被焚毁。或许值得注意的是，根据藏传佛教的说法，这些火灾是由一些访客因受到那烂陀学者的无礼对待而施咒引发的。

^* The three fabled libraries of Nalanda, Ratnodadhi (’sea of jewels’), Ratnasāgara (’ocean of jewels’) and Ratnarajaka (’jewel-adorned’), were all to be burnt down. Perhaps it is significant that, according to Tibetan Buddhist accounts of their end, the fires resulted from spells cast by visitors affronted by the rudeness they received from the scholars of Nalanda.

^{乌尔都语（Urdu）是波斯语}“zabān eurdū e muallā ”的缩写，意为“高贵营地的语言”。其中，首尾两个词源自阿拉伯语，中间一个词源自突厥语，连接词“e”则是纯正的波斯语。印地语（Hindi）是“Hindui”或“Hindvi”的缩写，意为“印度语”，最初由穆斯林使用。因为“Hind”一词本身是波斯语中“信度河”（Sindhu）的名称，希腊人（以及欧洲人）称之为印度河（Indus）。

^* The name Urdu is short for zabān eurdū e muallā, Persian for ‘language of the camp exalted’, where the first and last words are originally Arabic, the middle one Turkic, and the linking e’s pure Persian. Hindi is a shortening of Hindui or Hindvi, the word for ‘Indian talk’ originally used by Muslims, since the word Hind itself is a Persian version of the name of the Sindhu river, known to the Greeks (and Europeans) as the Indus.

^*有关英语方面的观点，请参阅第 12 章“视角转变——印度的英语”，第 501 页。

^* For the view from the English side, see Chapter 12, ‘Changing perspective—English in India’, p. 501.

6

三千年唯我论：希腊的冒险

6

Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek

斯巴达人致信雅典人（敦促他们结盟抵抗波斯人，公元前480年）：

Spartans to Athenians (urging an alliance to resist the Persians, 480 BC):

野蛮人没有一丝可信或真实的东西。

Barbarians have nothing trustworthy or true.

雅典人对斯巴达人说（答复）：

Athenians to Spartans (in reply):

世上没有哪个地方的黄金如此丰厚，也没有哪个国家的美丽和价值如此卓越，值得我们为了掠夺米底人、奴役希腊而欣然接受。事实上，即便我们想这么做，也有许多重要因素阻止我们……此外，还有希腊人的共同血统、共同语言、共同的神龛和祭祀仪式，以及相似的习俗，雅典人背叛这些是不对的。

There is nowhere so much gold or a country so outstanding in beauty and merit that we should be willing to take it as a reward for going over to the Medes and so enslaving Greece. In fact there are many important things stopping us from doing that even if we wanted to…and then again there is Greekness, being of the same blood and language, and having shared shrines and rituals of the gods, and similar customs, which it would not be right for the Athenians to betray.

希罗多德^*第八卷，142-4页

Herodotus^* viii. 142-4

ke tora ti tha yénume xorís varvárus？我是人类之后的我的卡皮亚丽西斯。

ke tóra ti tha yénume xorís varvárus? i ánthropi aftí ísan my a kápya lísis.

如今没有了野蛮人，我们该怎么办？这些人曾经是某种意义上的解决方案。

And now what will become of us without barbarians? These people were some sort of a solution.

康斯坦丁·卡瓦菲斯，《等待野蛮人》，1949年，111.35-6

Constantine Kavafis, Waiting for the Barbarians, 1949,111.35-6

在汉语和埃及语庄严的沉稳、梵语感性的华丽以及近东语言的创新绝对主义之后，希腊语给人的印象更加亲切，甚至可以说是现代。正是这门语言，属于将葡萄酒、橄榄油和文字带到地中海世界的民族；属于发明了逻辑、悲剧和选举制政府的民族；属于不仅以竞技游戏闻名，也以写实主义绘画艺术著称的民族。整个欧洲都直接或间接地成为了他们的学生。欧洲语言的词典中充满了从希腊语借用的词汇，用来表达希腊的概念和事物；它们的语法，在被书写下来之后，也都是按照希腊的原则编纂的。

After the stately self-possession of Chinese and Egyptian, the sensuous prolixity of Sanskrit, and the innovative absolutisms of the Near Eastern languages, Greek makes a much more familiar, not to say modern, impression. This is the language of the people who brought wine, olive oil and literacy to the Mediterranean world, who invented logic, tragic drama and elective government, famed as much for competitive games as for figurative arts of striking realism. All of Europe became directly or indirectly their students. The dictionaries of European languages are all full of words borrowed from Greek to express Greek concepts and artefacts, and their grammars too, when they came to be written down, were organised on Greek principles.

然而，希腊语本身的历史远比其整体影响力所显示的要复杂得多，也更引人入胜。它的传播不仅遍及地中海沿岸的近东地区，甚至在如今几乎完全找不到希腊痕迹的地区也同样如此。与英语一样，希腊语的传播途径多种多样——投机性的商业活动、赤裸裸的帝国主义扩张、文化魅力；但这些途径所取得的长期影响却截然不同。

Yet the history of the Greek language itself is far more complex and beguiling than its net influence would suggest. It was played out as much in the Near East as in the Mediterranean, in areas that are today all but purged of any trace of Greek. Like English, it was spread through a variety of means—speculative commerce, naked imperialism, cultural allure; and the means were very different in the long-term durability of what they achieved.

希腊语堪称古典语言发展历程的典范，它曾一度自负傲慢，这种傲慢在一千多年里得到了邻国的认可，邻国不仅欣然接受其先进的文化和技术，还给予其军事支持。这些强大却又被希腊语折服的邻国包括罗马帝国和基督教教会。希腊语的影响力最终衰落，是因为它失去了新的盟友，被迫独自面对一个冷酷无情的敌人，而这个敌人的文化支持则转向了其他领域。这生动地展现了一种享有盛誉的语言在其社群停止创新，而世界其他地区迎头赶上时，将会面临怎样的命运。

Above all, Greek stands as an example of a classical language that ran its course, fostered with a self-regarding arrogance that for over a thousand years its neighbours were happy to endorse, giving it their military support as they accepted the benefits of its more advanced culture and technology. These powerful, but impressed, neighbours included the Roman empire and the Christian Church. Greek’s influence was eclipsed only when it ran out of new alliances, and was forced to face alone an unsympathetic enemy which drew its cultural support elsewhere. It is an instructive example of what can happen to a prestige language when its community ceases to innovate, and the rest of the world catches up.

希腊语的巅峰之作

Greek at its acme

希腊扩张的鼎盛时期出现在公元前一千年末期的一个世纪左右。那时，从位于今西班牙东北角的贸易站恩波里亚（今安普里亚斯）到印度的帕利博特拉（今巴特那），绵延4万斯塔迪亚（约8000公里），几乎相当于地球周长的四分之一，商贾、外交官和士兵的口中都充斥着希腊语。在这片广袤的土地上，超过80%的区域都处于希腊语统治之下，它们位于南巴尔干半岛希腊本土以东，一直延伸到今天的巴基斯坦。这片被称为“大希腊”的希腊化世界，是在大约七百年的时间里，在除了船、鞋、轮子、道路、马和文字之外，没有任何其他技术的情况下建立起来的。

The high point of Greek expansion came for a century or so approaching the close of the first millennium BC. Then the language could be heard on the lips of merchants, diplomats and soldiers from Emporiai (modern Ampurias), a trading post in the north-east corner of modern Spain, to Palibothras (Pātaliputra, modern Patna) in India, a distance of 40,000 stadia, or 8,000 kilometres, approaching a quarter of the circumference of the globe. Within this range, and over 80 per cent of its extent, there was a continuous band of lands under Greek-speaking administration, all to the east of the Greek homeland in the south Balkans, and extending as far as what is now Pakistan. This total expanse of Greater Greece, the Hellenised world, had been built up over about seven hundred years, without the benefit of any technology but the ship, the shoe, the wheel, the road, the horse, and writing.

这种事实上的世界通用语在当时六个不同的帝国和王国中流通。它被称为“通用语” （koiné diálektos ），或简称“通用语”（koinē），即雅典城邦特有的阿提卡希腊语方言，已在整个东地中海地区广泛使用。在希腊，它也逐渐取代了公元前四世纪之前盛行的二十种方言。这种语言的趋同很可能始于雅典自身的商业声望，尤其是其港口比雷埃夫斯，为希腊内部贸易中心增添了阿提卡语的色彩。公元前五世纪中叶，伯里克利统治时期雅典迎来了鼎盛时期，他曾向雅典同胞夸耀，雅典的繁荣使他们能够享用整个世界的物产。随着越来越多的外来者感到需要学习希腊语，以及希腊人自身的视野开始超越自身城市，阿提卡希腊语也随之传播开来。

This de facto world language had a currency that ranged over half a dozen distinct empires and kingdoms of the time. Known as he koiné diálektos—’the common talk’—or simply the koinē, Attic Greek, the particular dialect of the city of Athens, had become current all over the eastern Mediterranean. In Greece too it was gradually replacing all the twenty dialects that had flourished up until the fourth century BC. Probably this levelling began through the commercial prestige of Athens itself, with Piraeus, its port, giving an Attic linguistic tinge to the hub of intra-Greek trade. Pericles, who had presided over Athens’ glory days in the mid-fifth century BC, had already boasted to his fellow-Athenians of a prosperity that allowed them to benefit from the produce of the whole earth. As more outsiders felt the need to learn Greek, and Greeks themselves began to have an outlook wider than their own city, Attic Greek spread.

尽管传播方式不同，但它已经引发了一些与今天英语引发的相同态度。五世纪的一份政治小册子声称，虽然希腊人普遍使用各自的方言，但雅典人却说着各种方言以及所有蛮族语言的混合语。 ¹在马其顿人波西迪普斯创作的二世纪喜剧中，一位来自色萨利（希腊北部）的人指责雅典人将所有希腊语都视为阿提卡语。雅典人在认真对待希腊其他地区方面存在一些问题，这与希腊人普遍对待世界其他地区的问题如出一辙。如果他们不会说标准的希腊语，那么他们就和蛮族没什么两样。^*

And despite the different means of achieving its spread, it was already eliciting some of the same attitudes that English evokes today. A political pamphlet of the fifth century had claimed that while Greeks in general used each their own dialect, Athenians spoke a mixture of all of them, and all barbarian languages too.¹ In a comedy of the second century, written by the Macedonian Posidippus, a Thessalian (from the north of Greece) reproaches the Athenians for seeing all Greek as Attic. Athenians had some of the same problems in taking the rest of Greece seriously that Greeks in general had with the rest of the world. If they failed to speak proper Greek, they were, after all, no better than barbarians.^*

谁是希腊人？

Who is a Greek?

这是什么？这是什么？ Skiás ónar ánthropos。

Tí dè tis? Tí d’ ou tis? Skiás ónar ánthrōpos.

什么是“人”？什么是“无我”？影子的梦境是人。

What is someone? What is no one? A shadow’s dream is man.

品达，《皮提亚颂歌》，viii.95—6

Pindar, Pythian Odes, viii.95—6

在公元1821年获得独立之前，希腊人只有在被外来势力联合征服之后才得以在政治上统一。这种情况最早发生在公元前四世纪，当时的征服者是位于其北部边境的马其顿国王腓力二世。然而，在此前的一千年里，其他文明与希腊人接触时，似乎始终将他们视为同一民族的成员。

Until their independence in AD 1821, the Greeks had only ever been united politically in the aftermath of joint conquest by some outsider. This happened for the first time in the fourth century BC, when the outsider was Philip, the king of Macedon on their northern border. Nevertheless, over the previous thousand years other civilisations encountering the Greeks appear always to have seen them as members of a single ethnic group.

从某种意义上说，这很奇怪，因为外人总是只用他们遇到的那个族群的部落名称来称呼他们。希腊人自称的“Héllēnes ”从未在希腊以外的地方流行起来。^*波斯人称他们为“Yauna”，因为他们遇到的是爱奥尼亚希腊人，在荷马史诗中，爱奥尼亚希腊人被称为“láwones”，荷马是希腊传统中最早的诗人。^†在希腊世界的另一端，罗马人称希腊人为“Graii”。他们遇到了来自优卑亚岛和波俄提亚的希腊殖民者，这些殖民者正在意大利建立一座名为库迈（Cumae，后被罗马人称为Cumae）的新城。事实上，“Graii”似乎是为了纪念波俄提亚南部一个名为格莱亚（Graia）的小镇。§ “Greek” （希腊人）一词源于拉丁语“Graecus” ，这是一个由“Graii”（源自“Grai-icus ”）构成的简单形容词，并逐渐取代了最初的“Graii”。

In a way, this was strange, since outsiders always knew them simply by the tribal name of the group they happened to encounter. The Greeks’ shared name for themselves, Héllēnes, never caught on outside Greece.^* The Persians knew them as Yauna, for their encounter was with the Ionian Greeks, who are called láwones in Homer, the earliest Greek in the tradition. ^† At the opposite end of the Greek world, the Romans got to know the Greeks as Graii. They were meeting Greek colonists from Euboea and Boeotia, who were setting up a new city of Cyme in Italy (later known by the Romans as Cumae). In fact, Graii seems to memorialise a small town in southern Boeotia called Graia. § The word Greek comes through the Latin Graecus, a straightforward adjective formed from this name (from Grai-icus), and came to take over from the original Graii.

那么，究竟什么是希腊人呢？无论采用何种称谓？尽管语言是主要标准，但人们普遍认为希腊人之间的共同点远不止于此。在希罗多德的一段著名记载中，雅典人被要求解释他们为何永远不会背叛希腊。^他们提到了“希腊性”（Hellēnikón），即拥有相同的血统、相同的语言、共同的神龛、共同的仪式和相似的习俗。当然，共同的血统无法客观地证明或确定，尽管人们会对彼此的面部特征和肤色有所感知。共同的语言体现在所有希腊方言的相互理解上。至于共同的神祇崇拜，荷马史诗和其他赞歌中的叙述证实了奥林匹斯诸神的存在，即便不同地方的祭祀活动可能各有不同。对公共神谕的尊重（人们可以从中寻求预言的洞见，其中最著名的是德尔斐的阿波罗神谕）以及参加四年一度的奥林匹克运动会（其获胜者的记录可以追溯到公元前776年）是另外两个将希腊人团结在一起的重要制度^。

What, then, was a Greek, by any of these appellations? Although the main criterion was language, there was a general feeling that Greeks had much more in common than that. In a famous passage of Herodotus, the Athenians are made to explain why they will never betray Greece.² They advert to to Hellēnikón, ‘Greekness’, which is defined as having the same blood and the same language, common shrines of deities, common rituals and similar customs. Common blood, of course, was not something that could be proved or ascertained objectively, though there would have been a feeling for facial features and no doubt skin colour. Common language was evident through mutual intelligibility of all the Greek dialects. As for common service to common gods, the Olympian pantheon was validated in the narrative of the Homeric epics and other hymns, even if the actual practice of cults in different places could be quite unique. Respect for common oracles where prophetic insight could be sought, the most notable being Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, and attendance at the quadrennial Olympic games (whose records of victors extend back to 776 BC) were two other major institutions that bound the Greeks together.^*

事实上，希腊人总觉得有一种理性基础使他们与蛮族（即其他人类）区别开来，蛮族的语言变化无常，只能被视为“bar-bar”的变体，几乎不值得与动物发出的声音区分开来。^†任何外来的事物都被认为有些荒谬可笑。

In fact, the Greeks always felt that there was a rational basis that set them apart from the bárbaroi, the rest of humanity, whose varying speech could just be thought of as an elaboration of ‘bar-bar’, hardly worth distinguishing from the noises made by animals, ^† Anything foreign was felt somehow to be ridiculous.

因此，历史学家希罗多德将埃塞俄比亚特罗戈迪特人（原文如此）的语言描述为听起来像蝙蝠的尖叫声，³而在一场严重的悲剧中，⁴女王克吕泰涅斯特拉——诚然，她傲慢自大——推测特洛伊公主卡珊德拉可能说着一种像燕子一样的未知语言。甚至连尤利乌斯·凯撒时代的、博学多识的地中海世界地理学家斯特拉波本人，也在他的西班牙民族志（3.3.7）中写道：“我不愿继续描述这些名字，因为我知道写下来会令人不快，除非有人真的乐于听到普鲁陶罗伊人、巴尔迪耶泰人或阿洛特里格斯人，或者其他更难听、更无意义的名字。”

So the historian Herodotus describes the language of the Ethiopian Trogodytes (sic) as sounding like screeching bats,³ and in the midst of a serious tragedy⁴ Queen Clytaemnestra—admittedly a picture of condescending arrogance—conjectures that Cassandra, the Trojan princess, may speak an unknown language like that of swallows. Even Strabo himself, cosmopolitan geographer of the Mediterranean world in the time of Julius Caesar, writes in the midst of his gazetteer of the peoples of Spain (3.3.7): ‘I am loath to go on about the names, conscious of the unpleasantness of them written down, unless someone could actually enjoy hearing of the Pleutauroi, the Bardyetai or the Allotriges, or other names even fouler and more meaningless.’

希腊人在许多经典文献中阐述了他们的理想。其中最杰出的当属修昔底德所记载的公元前431年伯里克利为阵亡将士所作的演说。^伯里克利是雅典的领袖，他建造了帕特农神庙，并带领雅典与斯巴达进行了伟大的战争。这篇演说旨在总结雅典对文明的贡献，他并非声称雅典与其他城市一样，而是要树立榜样（parádeigma）。他谈到一种自由的政治方式，这种方式对所有人开放，无论贫富；谈到对私人生活的宽容；谈到享受公共娱乐。他赞扬了雅典的军事成就，但同样也赞扬了雅典不像其主要敌人斯巴达那样将军事准备奉为圭臬。一切的关键在于找到合适的平衡点；他用一句非常希腊式的短语说道：

There are many classic texts where Greeks have set out their ideals. Outstanding among them is Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ Speech for the War Dead made in 431 BC.⁵ Pericles was the leader of Athens who built the Parthenon and led the city into its great war against Sparta. This speech is an attempt to summarise Athens’ contribution to civilisation, not claiming that the city was like others, but rather setting them an example (parádeigma). He talks of a free approach to politics which is open to all, however poor, of tolerance in private life, of the enjoyment of public entertainments. He glories in the city’s military accomplishments, but no less in the fact that they do not (unlike their main enemy, Sparta) make a fetish of military preparedness. All lies in striking the right balance; in a very Greek phrase, he says:

philokalo$utmen met' euteleías kaì philosopho$utmen áneu malakías

philokalo$uTmen met’ euteleías kaì philosopho$uTmen áneu malakías

我们既热爱美，又注重节约；既热爱智慧，又不拘泥于形式。

we are beauty-lovers with a sense of economy, and wisdom-lovers without softness.

总的来说，他说，整个雅典城对希腊来说都是一次教育。^艺术、物有所值、智慧和体魄强健：这就是雅典人喜欢认为自己代表的。（至于对智慧的热爱，希腊人很难区分哲学和对聪明才智的欣赏。）

Overall, he said, the whole city of Athens was an education to Greece.⁶ Art, value for money, wisdom and physical prowess: that is what Athens liked to think it stood for. (And as for love of wisdom, Greek does not easily distinguish between philosophy and appreciation of cleverness.)

显然，这些言论反映了雅典理想中的乐观态度。然而，在随后的战争中，雅典并没有展现出任何美好而明智的行为，最终也确实战败了。尽管如此，伯里克利将雅典视为希腊的教育中心这一观点是正确的：虽然在他演讲后的一个世纪里，雅典的政治地位逐渐下降，但它作为希腊文化中心的地位却从未动摇。在接下来的千年里，雅典一直是众多求知若渴的学生前来学习的城市，他们始终用希腊语学习，即便这些学生可能来自罗马帝国的任何地方，甚至更远的地方。

Evidently, these reflected an optimistic statement of Athenian ideals. Beautiful and wise deeds were not conspicuous in the conduct of the war that followed, and which indeed Athens went on to lose. Nevertheless, Pericles had been right to see Athens as an education to Greece: although it gradually lost political importance in the century that followed his speech, it never lost its status as the focus of Greek culture. It remained a city where serious students would come to study for the next thousand years, always in Greek, even though they might come from anywhere in the Roman empire, or beyond.

事实上，雅典的学术领先地位一直持续到基督教对其持续的自信以及对前基督教时期开放思想的忠诚感到不满为止。公元529年，罗马皇帝查士丁尼关闭了雅典的学校。但其语言在整个东地中海地区的卓越地位又延续了一千年之久。

In fact Athens’ intellectual leadership lasted until Christianity came to resent its continuing self-confidence and fidelity to its pre-Christian open-mindedness. The Roman emperor Justinian closed the school at Athens in AD 529. But the pre-eminence of its language remained, throughout the eastern Mediterranean, for another thousand years.

什么类型的语言？

What kind of a language?

Andròs kharaktēGr ek lógou gnorízetai

Andròs kharaktēGr ek lógou gnōrízetai

从一个人的言语中可以判断出他的类型。

A man’s type is recognised from his words.

米南德⁷

Menander⁷

$ēTthos anthr$ōApōi daímōn

人的性格决定命运。

Character for man is fate.

赫拉克利特⁸

Heraclitus⁸

几个世纪以来，将已知（西方）世界，特别是其受过教育的成员团结在一起的语言，是一个复杂的系统，它几乎不向外国学习者做出任何让步。它的单词是多音节的，辅音组合很复杂（例如p ^h t ^h árthai，“被摧毁”，tlēmonéstatos，“最悲惨的”，stlengís，“刮刀（洗澡时用来刮油）”，sp ^h rāgídion，“印章戒指”，glisk ^h rós，“粘的”）。

The language that so united the known (Western) world, especially its educated members, over all those centuries was a complex organism that made few concessions, if any, to foreign learners. Its words were polysyllabic, with complex clusters of consonants (p^ht^hárthai, ‘to be destroyed’, tlēmonéstatos, ‘most wretched’, stlengís, ‘scraper’ (used with oil at bath-time), sp^hrāgídion, ‘signet ring’, glisk^hrós, ‘sticky’).

说话者需要区分长元音和短元音，区分普通辅音和送气辅音，并且能够驾驭复杂的词缀系统。在这个系统中，一个普通名词有九种不同的形式，一个形容词有十九种，一个动词则超过两百种。当然，这个系统也存在一些规律，但它们最终都无济于事：名词有十种主要的词形变化模式，形容词有十种，而动词除了十种不同的词形变化模式外，还有超过350个动词在某些方面是不规则的。这些复杂的词形变化，再加上复合词的倾向（正如引述伯里克利的话所表明的那样），意味着单词可以变得非常长，这一特点有时甚至让希腊人自己都觉得有趣：有记录的最长单词，是一个用来形容一道美食杰作的词，出现在公元前五世纪的一部喜剧中：⁹

Speakers needed to tell long vowels from short, plain consonants from breathy ones, and be able to manage elaborate systems of prefixes and suffixes, where an ordinary noun would have nine different forms, and an adjective nineteen, and a verb well over two hundred. There were, of course, regularities in the system, but they fought a losing battle: there were ten major patterns for nouns, ten more for adjectives, and besides ten different patterns for verbs, there were well over 350 individual verbs that were irregular somewhere. These complex inflexions, taken together with the tendency to compound terms (as seen in Pericles’ remarks quoted), meant that words could become very long, a characteristic that sometimes amused the Greeks themselves: the longest on record, a term for a gastronomical masterpiece, comes in a fifth-century BC comedy:⁹

lopadotemakhoselakhogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiok

arabomelitokatakekhumenokikhlepikossuphophattoperisteralektruono

ptokephalliokinklopeleiolagōiosiraiobaphētraganopterúgōn.

但长度为十个字母或以上的单词几乎出现在每篇文章的每个句子中。而专有名词本身通常可以清晰地分析为复合名词，因此它们尤其重要。

But words ten letters long and more occur in almost every sentence of every text. And proper names, which are themselves very often clearly analysable as compound nouns, are particularly heavyweight.

希腊语词汇的复杂性与语言风格的灵活性相伴而生：在句子内部，词序几乎完全自由，因此，名词、形容词和动词的词尾（标记性、格、数和人称）在很大程度上决定了词义之间的关系：谁对谁做了什么，实际表达的是什么。在这里，艺术开始取代自然：希腊语散文风格的精妙发展，使得句子，尤其是在优美的演讲中，往往变得越来越长、越来越复杂，句子结构也越来越精巧，构成了所谓的“克制风格”（léxis katestramménē），这种风格深受希腊听众的喜爱。

Together with complexity of individual words went the flexibility of Greek style: within a clause, word order was almost totally free, and so it was largely the endings of the nouns, adjectives and verbs, marking gender, case, number and person, which made clear the relationships between the meanings of words: who did what to whom, what in effect was being said. Here art began to take over from nature: the elaboration of Greek prose style by the sophistaí (’wise-guys’, as professional pundits were known) meant that sentences, especially in fine speaking, tended to become ever longer and more ramified, with artfully balanced clauses, in the so-called léxis katestramménē, ‘constrained style’, so widely admired by Greek audiences.

公元前几个世纪的希腊语听起来与今天的希腊语截然不同。主要原因是当时的希腊语是声调语言，每个词都有其独特的音调，由高音和低音组成，这与今天日语的重音最为相似。公元后的最初几个世纪，这套声调系统逐渐瓦解，但并未消失，而是发生了转变：如今，希腊语中重读的音节与过去高音的音节相同。

The language in those centuries BC would have sounded very different from Greek as spoken today. The main reason for this was the fact that it was tonal, each word given a distinctive melody of high and low tones, in a way that is most closely paralleled today by accent in Japanese. The system gradually broke down in the first few centuries AD, but was transmuted rather than disappeared: nowadays Greeks stress the same syllable that used to have high tone.

总的来说，对语言学习者而言，似乎最棘手的并非语法，而是语音结构的复杂性。我们在千禧年之交前后的信件（通常保存在埃及的莎草纸上）中发现的大部分错误都与拼写有关：最重要的是，他们已经很难区分许多不同的高元音和双元音（i、ei、ē、oi、u）。果不其然，所有这些不同的发音在现代语言中都合并成了“ i”。名词和动词系统则保持得相当好：它们在一定程度上得到了简化，但时至今日，典型的希腊名词仍然有五六种形式，动词则有二十种。^*

Overall, it seems to have been the complexities in sound structure, rather than grammar, which pressed hardest on language-learners. Most of the mistakes we find in correspondence from around the turn of the millennium (usually on sheets of papyrus preserved in Egypt) concern spelling: above all, they were already finding it difficult to keep many of the various high vowels and diphthongs apart (i, ei, ē, oi, u). Sure enough, all these distinct sounds have merged as i in the modern language. The noun and verb systems held up remarkably well: they have been simplified to an extent, but to this day the typical Greek noun still has five or six forms, and the verb twenty.^*

公元前二世纪之前，希腊语社群的一个显著特征是其分散性。公元前二千年和公元前一千年初期，希腊语在巴尔干半岛南部和爱琴海诸岛及沿岸的众多小型社群中发展起来；这些社群大多被海洋和山脉隔绝，在发展出专业化经济之前，其规模必然较小。这导致各个方言逐渐发展并走向各自的方向，而大规模的人口迁徙将多利安希腊人从北部带到伯罗奔尼撒半岛中部，进一步加剧了这种局面。尽管希腊人之间仍然能够相互交流，但在公元前五世纪之前，各个社群（希腊语称之为“póleis”）仍然保持独立；地方自豪感日益增强，并伴随着对地方方言的自觉使用。在出现共同的外部威胁或任何足以瓦解其独立性的军事强权之前，希腊人之间的联系主要体现在共同的祖先和宗教信仰上。共同的节日和共同的文学，让他们想起共同的遗产：但主动权仍然掌握在各个城市手中，每个城市都有自己的农场、牧场和渔场腹地。

One feature of the language community up until the second century BC was its disunity. In the second and early first millennia BC, Greek had developed in small communities all over the south of the Balkans and the Aegean islands and coastline; many of these communities were isolated by sea and mountain, and until they began to develop specialised economies, their size must have remained small. The result was a tendency for individual dialects to develop and go off in their own directions, a pattern that was further complicated when a large-scale migration brought the Doric Greeks out of the north and into the centre of the Peloponnese. Greeks remained able to intercommunicate throughout, but until the events of the fifth century BC, individual communities, póleis, as they were called, remained independent; local pride flowered, and with it a self-conscious use of local dialects. Before there was a common external threat, or any power with a military superiority sufficient to submerge their independence, ties among Greeks remained on the level of a sense of shared ancestry and religion. Shared festivals, and a shared literature, reminded them of a common heritage: but the initiative remained with the individual cities, each with their own hinterland of farms, pastures and fisheries.

通常，古代希腊人寻求了解自身历史时，会求助于诗歌，尤其是荷马的作品。荷马的《伊利亚特》和《奥德赛》，以及大量献给特定神祇的赞歌，在很大程度上塑造了他们对过去的认知。赫西俄德也创作了更多类似的文学作品，他是一位生活在公元前700年左右、相对不那么神秘的人物；但古代世界对于哪位作家更早存在着激烈的争论。希腊人的始祖赫伦据说有三个儿子：埃俄罗斯、克苏图斯和多鲁斯。赫西俄德写道：¹⁰

Typically, when the Greeks of the ancient world looked for knowledge about their own history, they turned to poetry, and particularly to Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey, together with a host of hymns addressed to particular gods, largely defined their conception of the past. More such literature is attributed to Hesiod, who is a less shadowy figure from around 700 BC; but there was great dispute in the ancient world about which was the earlier. Hellēn, the eponymous forefather of the Greeks, was said to have had three sons, Aeolus, Xuthus and Dorus. Hesiod wrote:¹⁰

Héllenos d'egénonto philoptolemou basilēos | D&$oTbar;rós te Xo$uTthós te kai Aíolos hippiokharmēs

Héllenos d’ egénonto philoptolemou basilēos | D&$oTbar;rós te Xo$uTthós te kai Aíolos hippiokhármēs

好战的国王赫伦生下了多鲁斯、克苏图斯和战车战士埃俄罗斯。

And of war-loving king Hellēn were born | Dōrus and Xuthus and Aeolus the chariot-fighter.

克苏图斯随后生了两个儿子，伊翁和阿凯乌斯。这便清晰地解释了古代公认的四大方言群——埃奥利克语、多利克语、爱奥尼亚语和阿凯亚语——的起源。这些主要方言群被认为代表了希腊人整体上最高的亲缘关系，并且与近代开始客观研究希腊铭文时所发现的方言关系有相似之处：至少爱奥尼亚语、埃奥利克语和多利克语是主要的方言群。目前需要补充的主要内容是承认阿卡迪亚-塞浦路斯方言群，因为伯罗奔尼撒半岛中部和塞浦路斯的阿卡迪亚方言几乎完全相同，而与邻近的斯巴达和克里特岛的多利安方言则截然不同。关于不同方言群如何占据希腊各地的理论仍然纯粹是推测性的。

Xuthus then had two sons of his own, Ion and Achaeus. This neatly accounted for the origin of the four major dialect groups recognised in antiquity, namely Aeolic, Doric, Ionic and Achaean. These major groupings were felt to define the highest level of kinship among the Greeks as a whole, and they have something in common with the dialect relationships recognised when Greek inscriptions began to be studied objectively in modern times: at least Ionic, Aeolic and Doric are major groups. The main supplement needed is to recognise an Arcado-Cyprian group, since the dialects of Arcadia in the central Peloponnese and Cyprus are almost identical, and very different from the neighbouring Dorian dialects in Sparta and Crete. Theories about how the different groups came to occupy their various parts of Greece remain purely speculative.

希腊文化的重要特征之一是其语言创作的规范化倾向，由此创造出各种风格和体裁，使作家们能够有意识地进行创作。英雄史诗被汇集整合，最终形成了以荷马为代表的史诗风格。旅行者的故事被整理成册，并作为最早的地理和历史著作问世。在诸如体育比赛等公共集会上，人们为了鼓舞士气而吟唱的合唱歌曲，被保存下来，成为抒情诗。原本定期举行的、用于阐释和演绎特定神祇神话的宗教仪式，被转化为戏剧；参与者不再是仪式的重复，而是对古代故事中设定的情境的探讨。这便催生了第一部悲剧。最重要的是，对城市政策的公开讨论以及对犯罪嫌疑人的审讯逐渐规范化，成为公共演讲的实践：对此特别感兴趣的人进行培训，修辞学领域由此诞生，这或许是古代西方历史上最具影响力的知识学科。其他一些关于更广泛主题的对话，在被记录下来后，成为了哲学的基础。^*

One of the important features of Greek culture was a tendency to formalise its linguistic productions, thereby creating styles and genres in which writers could go on to compose consciously. So heroic lays were pulled together and integrated, producing the epic style consummated by Homer. Travellers’ tales were organised and then presented as the first works of geography and history. Choral songs sung for inspiration at public gatherings, such as athletic games, were preserved as lyric poetry. Religious liturgy, which had been performed regularly to expound and enact the myths of particular gods, was transformed into drama; the celebrants would now be seen as actors, their words not rituals but examinations of the situations set up in the ancient stories. This gave rise to the first tragedy. Above all, the public discussions of city policy, and examinations of those suspected of crimes, became regularised into the practice of public speaking: training was given by those who were particularly interested in it, and the field of rhetoric was born, probably the most influential intellectual discipline in ancient Western history. Other conversations, on more general themes, when written up became the foundation of philosophy.^*

这些早期希腊文学作品（到公元前四世纪末已基本定型）的一个显著特征是其“公共性”：它们源于公共语境中使用的语言，并且大多关注公共事务。^*这与早期希腊历史的政治背景密切相关：尽管各个城邦的宪法千差万别，而且极少有实行平等民主制的城邦，但这些社会的一个共同特征是开放性。公开集会十分频繁，人们期望所有公民（妇女、儿童、奴隶和外国人除外）都能积极参与——哪怕只是作为群众的一员——共同体的政治生活。因此，希腊语最初是作为一种具有公共精神的语言而传播开来的。正如我们在现代民主国家的政治媒体中所看到的那样，公共事务的追求也变成了大众娱乐：在一次著名的场合，一位雅典公民大会上的演说家指责他的听众是“演讲的旁观者，事件的听众”，也就是说，他们更关注被告知的内容和表达方式，而不是自己的常识。 ¹¹

A striking characteristic of most of these early products of Greek literature (all well established by the end of the fourth century BC) is their ‘public’ character: they arise from language used in a public context, and they are largely about matters of public concern.^* This is of a piece with the political context of early Greek history: although the constitutions of the different poleis were very varied, and very few were egalitarian democracies, a common property of the societies was openness. Open assemblies were frequent, and the expectation was that all citizens (excluding women, children, slaves and foreigners) would take an active part—if only as a member of a mob—in the political life of the community. Greek, therefore, began its spread as a language for the public-spirited. And in much the same way as one sees in the political media in modern democracies, the pursuit of public affairs becomes the stuff of mass entertainment: on one famous occasion, an orator in the Athenian assembly accused his public of being theataì mèn t&$oTbar;n lógōn, akroataì dè t&$oTbar;n érg&$oTbar;n, ‘spectators of speeches, listeners to events’, i.e. paying more attention to what they were told, and how it was said, than to their own common sense.¹¹

希腊语社群的开放性与当时传播的另一种重要语言——梵语——形成了鲜明的对比。这两种语言都发展出了重要的语言使用理论。但正如我们所见，梵语理论旨在保存宗教文本的细节；因此，它专注于语言语法和发音的细枝末节，很少关注如何改善与他人的沟通。希腊语语言学理论（直到罗马帝国的学校教育模式兴起之前^）主要关注如何有效地运用语言来说服他人：它假定使用者已经掌握了语法细节（尽管这些细节很复杂），理论家们更多地讨论如何构建法律案例，或者（如果倾向于哲学思考）如何构建有效的论证形式。可以说，印度语语言学理论是一种客观的分析，而希腊语理论则始终与实际应用紧密相关。

The outward-looking nature of the Greek-speeking community is worth contrasting with that of another prestige language, which was spreading at much the same time—Sanskrit. Both languages developed significant theories of language use. But Sanskrit’s theory, as we have seen, was aimed at preservation of the details of religious texts; as such, it was focused on the minutiae of the language’s grammar and pronunciation, with little to offer to improve communication with other people. Greek linguistic theory (until the school requirements of the Roman empire take over^†) is focused above all on the effective use of language to persuade others: native command of the grammatical details tends to be assumed (despite their complexity), and the theorists talk rather about the construction of a case at law, or (if philosophically inclined) about the form of a valid argument. One could say that whereas Indian linguistic theory is an exercise in disinterested analysis, the Greek theories are always close to practical application.

家外之家：希腊人在定居点的传播

Homes from home: Greek spread through settlement

希腊语从其历史发源地——巴尔干半岛南部和爱琴海诸岛——传播开来，经历了两个过程：一个是零散的、持续时间长且传播方向分散的；另一个是组织严密、突然且势如破竹的。前者通常被称为希腊殖民运动；后者则是亚历山大征服波斯帝国。

The Greek language was spread from its historic home, the southern Balkan peninsula and Aegean islands, through two processes, one piecemeal, long lasting and diffuse in its direction, the other organised, sudden and breathtakingly coherent. One is usually known as the Greek colonisation movement; the other is Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire.

第一个阶段是希腊城邦对地中海和黑海沿岸的殖民，从公元前8世纪中期持续到公元前5世纪初。为何在这些海岸居住的众多民族中，只有希腊人和腓尼基人以这种方式建立起独立的中心，这个问题至今仍未得到解答。这些中心显然服务于多种目的，例如作为政治安全阀、原材料贸易站，以及将希腊农业推广到更肥沃、人口更稀少的土地上。但值得注意的是，这些中心都位于沿海地区，除了西西里岛之外，从未向内陆扩张。希腊的扩张发生在腓尼基人定居时期（公元前11世纪至8世纪）之后，因此，最重要的因素或许在于谁掌握了对海洋的有效控制权。尽管到这一时期末期，几乎所有可用的地中海沿岸地区都已有人居住，但在希腊人对所取得成就的理解中，西端占据了最重要的地位：意大利南部和西西里岛，尤其是西西里岛，构成了“大希腊”（ Megálē Héllas），通常在拉丁语中被称为Magna Graecia。

The first process, the colonisation of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts by Greek cities, lasted from the middle of the eighth to the early fifth century BC. The question why, of all the inhabitants of these shores, only the Greeks and the Phoenicians set up independent centres in this way has never been answered. The foundations clearly served a variety of purposes, as political safety valves, as trading posts for raw materials, and as opportunities to apply Greek agriculture to more abundant and less heavily populated soil, but it is noteworthy that they are exclusively coastal, never moving inland except on the island of Sicily. The Greek expansion came after the period of Phoenician settlements (eleventh to eighth centuries), so it may be that the most important factor was who had effective control of the sea. Although by the end of the period almost all available Mediterranean coasts had been populated, it was the western end which loomed largest in the Greek conception of what had been achieved: southern Italy and Sicily, par excellence, made up Megálē Héllas, ‘Great Greece’, usually named in Latin Magna Graecia.

不同的城市往往专注于不同的海岸线区域。在爱奥尼亚人中，卡尔基斯和埃雷特里亚占据了意大利西南部和西西里岛东北部；福西亚（本身是吕底亚边缘的一座城市）则占据了现代西班牙、科西嘉岛和法国的海岸线，包括马萨利亚（今马赛）。^*爱琴海南部的米利都城则覆盖了整个黑海沿岸，拥有十九个殖民地。

Different cities tended to specialise in different strips of coastline. Among the Ionians, Chalcis and Eretria went for south-western Italy and northeastern Sicily; Phocaea (itself a city on the edge of Lydia) took the coasts of modern Spain, Corsica and France, including Massalia (now Marseilles).^* The south Aegean city of Miletus covered the whole perimeter of the Black Sea, with nineteen colonies.

阿凯亚人主要占领了意大利东南沿海地区。人们普遍认为，这个国家的名字是由希腊人起的：Italia是(w)italoí的故乡，意为“一岁牛”，是etaloí的一个方言变体，后来被借入拉丁语为vituli，至今仍保留在veal（小牛肉）一词中。

Achaeans largely took over the south-eastern coast of Italy. This country is popularly supposed to have been given its name by the Greeks: Italia would be the land of (w)italoí, ‘yearling cattle’, a dialectal variant of etaloí, later borrowed in fact into Latin as vituli, and still with us in the word veal.

在多利安人中，科林斯、墨伽拉和罗德岛都再次将目光投向西西里岛，但这次的目标是东南部和南部。斯巴达只建立了一个殖民地，位于意大利的“脚背”（塔拉斯，即今天的塔兰托）。除了在西西里岛的活动外，墨伽拉还专注于黑海东南部，其中包括最具决定性意义的布扎斯殖民地。一千年后，布扎斯被选为罗马帝国的新首都——拜占庭（即君士坦丁堡）。而锡拉则独树一帜，它向南扩张，在昔兰尼的非洲海岸建立了一个殖民地。

Among the Dorians, Corinth, Megara and Rhodes all targeted Sicily again, but this time the south-east and south. Sparta placed one colony only, on the instep of Italy (Táras, the modern Taranto).† Besides its role in Sicily, Megara also specialised in the south-east of the Black Sea, including the most fateful foundation of all, Búzas, a thousand years later chosen as a new capital for the Roman empire, Byzantium§ or Constantinople. Uniquely, Thera headed south to found a colony on the African coast at Cyrene.¶

尽管殖民地（apoikíai，字面意思是“家外之家”）通常由来自“母城”或mētrópolis的“建城者”（ oikistébar;s）领导——他们与母城之间存在着历史和情感上的联系，而非政治或军事上的联系——但其创始人口可能来自多个城市，因此新建立的殖民地人口构成可能相当复杂，尽管方言差异较小。铭文表明，殖民地使用的语言几乎总是与母城的语言相近。12^我们可以对比一下英语在北美持续占据主导地位的情况，尽管在19世纪，英语殖民者的人数少于其他语言的使用者（参见第492页）。

Although colonies (apoikíai—literally ‘homes-from-home’) were generally led by a ‘home-builder’, oikistébar;s, from the ‘mother city’ or mētrópolis—with whom there would be a historic and emotional, though not political or military, bond—their founding populations might be recruited from a number of cities, so the new foundations could be quite mixed in population, although less so in dialect. The inscriptions suggest that the language spoken was almost always close to that of the metropolis.¹² One could compare the continued dominance of English in North America, even though English colonists were outnumbered by speakers of other languages in the nineteenth century (see p. 492).

这场运动的直接影响或许更多地体现在文化而非语言方面。在新来者到来之前，这些地区并非无人居住，当地居民（包括高卢人、伊特鲁里亚人、罗马人、斯基泰人和亚美尼亚人）也没有随着时间推移而消失。^*虽然希腊人统治了沿海地区，许多殖民地也分出分支在同一地区建立新的殖民地，但它们从未成为更大范围国家的中心。（与此形成鲜明对比的是，迦太基——曾经是腓尼基人的殖民地——在这一时期及之后经历了强大的自我扩张。）这些殖民地，尤其是在西西里岛和意大利南部，以其财富和科学文化而闻名：巴门尼德、芝诺、毕达哥拉斯、色诺芬尼、恩培多克勒和阿基米德都是来自西方的希腊人。政治创新并非他们的强项。†

The immediate effects of this movement were arguably more cultural than linguistic. The areas were not uninhabited before the newcomers arrived, and the local populations (among them Gauls, Etruscans, Romans, Scyths and Armenians) did not fade away over time.^* Although the Greeks dominated their coastal regions, and many colonies put out offshoots to create new colonies in the same region, they never became the focus for states on a larger scale. (Contrast this with the powerful self-aggrandisement, over this period and later, of Carthage, once a Phoenician colony.) The colonies, especially in Sicily and southern Italy, were famed for their wealth, and their scientific culture: Parmenides, Zeno, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Empedocles and Archimedes were all Greeks of the west. Political innovation was not a particular forte.†

事实上，这些殖民地成为了希腊文化进入西地中海和黑海的桥头堡；这种分散的希腊文化持续了近千年。公元前一世纪末，斯特拉波写道：“但如今，除了塔兰托、雷焦和那不勒斯之外，整个大希腊地区都已被‘蛮夷化’，部分地区被卢卡尼亚人和布鲁提人占领，部分地区被坎帕尼亚人占领。但这只是名义上的占领；实际上是被罗马人占领的——因为他们已经变成了罗马人。” ¹³文中提到的这三座城市据说又保留了几个世纪的希腊文化。时至今日，在意大利最南端的两个小飞地——卡拉布里亚的博韦西亚（位于雷焦东南）和普利亚莱切以南的卡利梅拉和马尔塔诺村——仍然有人说希腊语。

The colonies in fact became bridgeheads for Greek culture into the western Mediterranean and Black Sea; and this separate scattered Greek presence continued for close on a thousand years. Strabo, at the end of the first century BC, wrote: ‘But now except for Taras and Rhegion and Neapolis [Taranto, Reggio and Naples], all [of Magna Graecia] has been “barbarised out”,§ and some parts are taken by Lucanians and Bruttians, and others by Campanians. But that is just in name; in fact by Romans—for that is what they have become.’¹³ The three cities mentioned are supposed to have retained their Greekness for another couple of centuries. And Greek is spoken to this day in the extreme toe and heel of Italy in two tiny enclaves: Bovesia in Calabria (south-east of Reggio), and the villages Calimera and Martano south of Lecce in Puglia.

这些殖民地在向邻近的高卢和意大利民族传播文字方面发挥了至关重要的作用：从法国里维埃拉的马萨利亚，高卢人学会了用希腊字母书写自己的语言；西南海岸的皮特库塞（伊斯基亚岛）和库迈首先将文字传授给了坎帕尼亚的伊特鲁里亚人，进而传授给了整个意大利中部和北部的伊特鲁里亚人；再往南一点，帕埃斯图姆（波塞冬尼亚）将文字传授给了卢卡尼亚的奥斯坎人，而意大利“靴跟”地区的塔拉斯则将文字传授给了卡拉布里亚的梅萨皮人。其中最重要的是一条间接的教育传播途径：除了意大利北部的许多其他民族（例如阿尔卑斯山麓的因苏布里亚高卢人）之外，伊特鲁里亚人还教会了他们的宿敌罗马人读写。在接下来的二十七个世纪里，通过一系列精心策划的成功征服和商业渗透，罗马字母成为世界上使用最广泛的字母。

The colonies played a cardinal role in introducing neighbouring peoples of Gaul and Italy to writing: from Massalia on the French Riviera, Gauls learnt to write their own language in Greek characters; Pithecusae (Ischia) and Cumae on the south-western coast taught the Etruscans first of Campania, and hence of the whole centre and north of Italy; a little farther south, Paestum (Poseidonia) could pass literacy on to the Oscans in Lucania, and over in the heel, Taras to the Messapians in Calabria. Most significant of all was one indirect path of such education: as well as many others in north Italy (for example, the Insubrian Gauls in the foothills of the Alps), the Etruscans went on to teach their great adversaries the Romans to read and write. Through an elaborate cascade of successful conquests and commercial infiltrations over the next twenty-seven centuries, the Roman alphabet has become the most widely used in the world at large.

以这种方式传承下来的字母并非今天的希腊字母。今天的希腊字母于公元前403-402年在雅典得到有效标准化，^*并在下一代被希腊全境采用。† 在希腊历史的早期（公元前八世纪），不同方言地区仍存在各自偏好的字母变体，而大多数在意大利拥有殖民地的城邦都倾向于使用所谓的西方字母。在这种字母中，H 代表送气辅音“aitch”，X 而非 $XI 代表 [ks]，字母 θ、$XI、Φ、PΩ 被省略，但 F 和 Q 被保留。§ 意大利人采用了这种字母，但如同在大规模生产文字出现之前的时代一样，也存在各种地方变体。（勒蓬蒂克语、伊特鲁里亚语、奥斯坎语、翁布里亚语、法利斯克语和梅萨皮亚语的字母都与拉丁字母不同。）

The alphabets that were passed on in this way were not today’s Greek alphabet, which was to be effectively standardised in Athens in 403-402 BC,^* and then adopted throughout Greece in the next generation.† At this earlier time in Greek history (from the eighth century BC), there were still competing variants favoured by different dialects, and most of the cities with colonies in Italy favoured the so-called Western alphabet, in which H was used to represent the aspirate consonant ‘aitch’, X not $XI was used to represent [ks], the letters θ $XI Φ PΩ were dropped, but F and Q were retained.§ This was the alphabet taken up by the Italians, though, as usual in an age before mass-produced writing, in various local versions. (Lepontic, Etruscan, Os-can, Umbrian, Faliscan and Messapian all had alphabets distinct from Latin’s.)

希腊扩张带来的另一项文化和经济益处是葡萄酒，它被带到了热情好客的西地中海地区——很可能还伴随着另一种奢侈饮品：橄榄油。贾斯汀（43.4）记载，建立马萨利亚的福西亚人不仅向周围的高卢人传授了公民生活和城市生活，还传授了葡萄种植技术。同样，间接影响可能比直接影响更为强大，因为众所周知，罗马人从希腊人那里学会了葡萄种植，并在进入高卢后积极推广葡萄种植，甚至超越希腊人，将其传播到地中海沿岸以外的地区。

Another cultural, and economic, boon of the Greek expansion was wine, now passed on to a very welcoming western Mediterranean—probably along with another luxury liquid, olive oil. Justin (43.4) represents the Phocaeans who founded Massalia as teaching the surrounding Gauls not just civic and urban life, but also how to tend vines.¶ Here again, it may be that indirect influence was more powerful than direct, for it is known that the Romans, who had learnt of the vine from the Greeks, were extremely active in promoting it when they moved into Gaul, superseding the Greeks by taking it far beyond the Mediterranean coast.

在当时希腊世界的另一端，黑海周围的殖民地似乎在希腊大陆的生活中扮演着更加重要的角色，因为它们为希腊大陆提供了小麦（产自斯基泰/乌克兰的大片田野）和令人垂涎的奥普萨（一种用干鱼制成的调味品），这是希腊人最渴望的香料。

At the other end of the then Greek world, the colonies round the Black Sea appear to have played a more integrated role in mainland Greek life, since they came to supply it both with wheat (grown on the vast fields of Scythia/Ukraine) and the all-consuming opsa, relishes made of dried fish, the most sought-after spices for the Hellenes.

希腊人对游牧的斯基泰人产生了一种隐隐的敬意：他们像斯基泰人一样，击退了波斯人的入侵企图。总的来说，斯基泰人对希腊的习俗相当不感冒；但希罗多德记载了两位对希腊文化颇感兴趣的人，一位是阿那卡西斯（后来成为传奇的智者），另一位是斯基勒斯。最终，他们都屈服于希腊宗教仪式的禁忌魅力：当时的希腊人并不像现代人所认为的那样，是古代世界的理性主义者。

The Greeks came to have a sneaking respect for the nomadic Scythians: like them they would see off an attempted Persian invasion. In general, they were quite impervious to Greek ways: but Herodotus recalls two who had a taste for things Greek, Anacharsis (who became a legendary sage) and Scyles. In both cases, ultimately it was the forbidden charms of Greek religious ceremonies to which they yielded: the Greeks were not then seen in their modern light, as the arch-rationalists of the ancient world.

亚洲诸王：希腊通过战争扩张

Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war

Hoi huméteroi progonoi elthóntes eis Makedonían kaì eis tèbaren állbaren Helláda kak$oTbar;s epoíēsan hēmás oudèn proēdikēménoi; egòbar;o dè tòbar;n Hellébar;nōn hēgemòbar;n katastatheìs kaì timōrébar;sasthai boulómenos Pérsas diébēn es tèbar;n 亚洲人， huparksántōn hum$oTbar;n…Kaì to$uT loipo$uT hótan pémpēis par' éme, hōs pròs basiléa tŋbar;s Asia pémpe, mēdè ex ísou epístelle, all' h$oTbar;s kuríōi ónti pántōn t$oTbar;ns$oTbar;n phráze eí tou déēi…

Hoi huméteroi prógonoi elthóntes eis Makedonían kaì eis tèbaren állbaren Helláda kak$oTbar;s epoíēsan hēmás oudèn proēdikēménoi; egòbar;o dè tòbar;n Hellébar;nōn hēgemòbar;n katastatheìs kaì timōrébar;sasthai boulómenos Pérsas diébēn es tèbar;n Asían, huparksántōn hum$oTbar;n…Kaì to$uT loipo$uT hótan pémpēis par’ éme, hōs pròs basiléa tŋbar;s Asías pémpe, mēdè ex ísou epístelle, all’ h$oTbar;s kuríōi ónti pántōn t$oTbar;n s$oTbar;n phráze eí tou déēi…

你们的祖先进入马其顿和希腊其他地区，无缘无故地侵犯了我们；而我，作为希腊人的领袖，为了向波斯人复仇，已经渡海进入亚洲，而这一切都是你们挑起的……以后你们再来找我，就以亚洲之王的身份，不要以平等的身份与我通信，而是以你们所有土地的主人的身份，如果有什么需要，就告诉我……

Your ancestors entering Macedonia and the rest of Greece wronged us without previous grievance; but I, constituted as leader of the Greeks and wishing to take vengeance on the Persians, have crossed into Asia, something that you people started… And in future when you send to me, send to me as King of Asia, and do not correspond on equal terms, but as to the lord of all that is yours, tell me if you need anything…

公元前332年，亚历山大致波斯国王大流士：阿里安，《历史》第二卷第14章

Alexander to Darius, king of Persia, 332 BC: Arrian, ii.14

在希腊三千年有记载的历史中，大约四分之一的时候，出现了一个改变一切的十年。

About a quarter of the way through the three thousand years of Greek’s recorded history came the single decade that changed everything.

公元前334年至325年间，马其顿国王亚历山大三世率领的希腊军队消灭了波斯帝国，其疆域几乎涵盖了现代土耳其、叙利亚、以色列、埃及、约旦、伊拉克、科威特、亚美尼亚、伊朗、阿富汗和巴基斯坦的全部领土。亚历山大公开宣称，他发动这场战争是为了报复波斯在波斯战争中的侵略。尽管波斯战争发生在一个半世纪前，是他们的曾祖辈的亲身经历，而且当时的希腊政权也已截然不同，但这段历史仍然深深地烙印在希腊人的心中。与此同时，英国也应该正在为俄罗斯在克里米亚战争后可能发起的猛烈反击做好准备。

Over the period 334-325 BC a Greek army under Alexander III of Macedon eliminated the Persian empire, over almost the whole area of the modern states of Turkey, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Armenia, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Alexander’s declared motive was to take revenge for Persian aggression in the Persian Wars, still very present in Greek minds, although they had been an experience of their great-great-grandparents, a century and a half before, and Greece at least was now under very different management. On the same timescale Britain should now be preparing for Russia’s serious retaliation for the Crimean War.

这次闪电般的扩张，即希腊军事管理者对一个存在了两百多年的多民族帝国的全面接管，其结果是希腊语的使用范围和希腊文化传统的传播范围瞬间扩大了三倍。与地中海和黑海沿岸的殖民扩张不同，这次扩张并非沿着海岸线进行，而是对所有主要城市中心都采取了绝对控制。尽管单一统治者的统一统治并未持续太久（亚历山大在这次意义重大的战役两年后去世，他的帝国分崩离析，各自被其麾下的元帅瓜分），但希腊的统治地位却延续了下来。在波斯中部，这种统治持续了一个世纪，直到另一个讲伊朗语的势力——来自里海东南部的帕提亚人——重新夺回控制权。然而，希腊对埃及、叙利亚和巴比伦的控制，却持续了三百年之久才得以放松。尽管亚历山大对印度河西岸的宣称几乎立即被同样强大的印度皇帝旃陀罗笈多（Chandragupta）的进军所否定，旃陀罗笈多统治着巴特那（Patna），但以巴克特里亚（今阿富汗）为据点的希腊国王们却维持着与叙利亚国王们几乎相同的独立统治时间。他们向南扩张至犍陀罗（今斯瓦特）和旁遮普（今巴基斯坦境内）；虽然他们失去了对巴克特里亚的控制，但一度甚至到达了恒河东岸的巴特那。^*事实上，希腊王国在这里的延续时间比在希腊本土还要长，马其顿国王在公元前146年统治了两个世纪后，最终将主权让给了罗马。

The result of this lightning advance, the wholesale takeover by Greek military administrators of a multi-ethnic empire that had existed for over two hundred years, was an instant trebling of the area where the Greek language might be heard, and Greek cultural traditions known and appreciated. Unlike the colonial advance around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, this advance did not hug the coastline, but assumed supreme control over all the major established urban centres. Although the unitary control by a single ruler did not last (Alexander died two years after his momentous campaign, and his empire fell apart into the domains of his different marshals), Greek overlordship did survive. It lasted for a century in central Persia, until another Iranian-speaking power, this time the Parthians from south-east of the Caspian, reasserted control. But it was to be three hundred years before it relaxed its grasp on Egypt, Syria or Babylonia. And although Alexander’s claim on the west bank of the Indus was almost immediately annulled by the advance of the equally magnificent Indian emperor Chandragupta ruling from Patna, Greek kings based in Bactria (Afghanistan) continued an independent dominion for about as long as those in Syria. They moved south into Gandhara (Swat) and the Panjab (in what is now Pakistan); though they lost hold of Bactria itself, for a time they even reached as far to the east as Patna on the Ganges.^* In fact, Greek kingdoms lasted longer here than in Greece itself, where Macedonian kings yielded sovereignty to Rome after two centuries in 146 BC.

亚历山大征服的领土上的希腊化进程，造就了一个庞大的希腊语社群的核心地带，这个社群在接下来的千年里主宰着东地中海地区。早在公元286年罗马帝国正式分裂为东西两部分时，这个社群就已经存在了近千年，并被官方认可。此后，东罗马帝国逐渐转型为一个自觉的希腊帝国：恰如其分的是，它用来描述自身的词语“ rōmaĩos ”（罗马的）如今已成为一个常用词，意指“希腊的” ^。

The process of Hellenisation in the realms conquered by Alexander created the heartland of a vast Greek-speaking community that would dominate the eastern Mediterranean for over a thousand years. It had already existed for half this time when it was recognised officially, in AD 286, on the formal division of the Roman empire into east and west. The eastern Roman empire then transmuted gradually into a consciously Greek empire: appropriately, the word it used to describe itself, rōmaĩos, ‘Roman’, has become a popular word that now means ‘Greek’.^*

尽管希腊人在很长一段时间里在政治上占据主导地位——尽管他们从未实行民主制度——但其语言的实际传播可能远比这复杂得多。两百年来，阿拉姆语一直是整个波斯帝国的通用语，它最初是巴比伦和迦南的通用语。正如我们所见，阿拉姆语的普及程度并不均衡。但亚历山大的新臣民必然期望有一种独立的通用语言用于帝国行政管理。从一种语言有效地过渡到另一种语言，即便真的发生了，也不可能一蹴而就。

Although Greeks were, for a long time, politically pre-eminent—never as democrats—all over this vast dominion, the actual spread of their language was probably much more patchy. For two hundred years, Aramaic, originally the lingua franca of Babylon and Canaan, had been the convenient standard for the whole Persian empire. As we have seen, its take-up had not been uniform. But Alexander’s new subjects must have expected a separate, common, language, for imperial administration. Effective conversion from one such language to another, if it happened at all, cannot have been instant.

从东到西回顾证据，我们可以从印度使用的希腊语开始。公元前三世纪中期，阿育王在印度北部和中部各地以当地语言颁布法令，强调“法”（ dhamma，即美德）的重要性。他选择在坎大哈用阿拉姆语和希腊语刻下铭文。坎大哈在希腊人眼中更为人熟知的名字是亚历山大港，由亚历山大于公元前329年建立。阿育王的岩石敕令并非在那里发现的唯一希腊铭文。 ¹⁴坎大哈当时可能位于阿育王的领土边缘或更远的地方。印度希腊君主制时期的钱币证据十分丰富，这表明当时存在某种形式的双语现象，因为这些钱币的一面是希腊语，另一面是用佉卢文（Kharohi，阿拉姆语的另一种衍生文字）书写的印度俗语。事实上，希腊文字在钱币上的出现，在最后一位希腊国王和王后赫尔迈奥斯和卡利俄珀去世后，又延续了一个世纪之久。赫尔迈奥斯和卡利俄珀统治的疆域仅限于白沙瓦和开伯尔山口，他们大约于公元前30年去世。当时，政权已落入塞人/斯基泰人、帕拉瓦人/帕提亚人和贵霜人的手中，而这些民族的语言（伊朗语系）都源自兴都库什山脉以北。这或许表明当时仍有相当一部分人使用希腊语；但钱币上也出现了卡罗希语的印度文字，因此，这或许仅仅是为了在实际权力落入不识字的统治者手中时，赋予货币以传统和延续性的象征意义。

Reviewing the evidence from east to west, we can begin with Greek spoken in India. In the mid-third century BC, when the emperor Aśoka was setting up edicts urging the importance of dhamma, virtue, all over north and central India in the local vernacular, he chose at Kandahar to write the inscription in Aramaic and Greek. Kandahar was better known to Greeks as Alexandria of the Arachosians, founded by Alexander in 329, and Aśoka’s rock edict is not the only Greek inscription to have been found there.¹⁴ This would have been on, or beyond, the edge of his domain. Coin evidence is copious for the Greek monarchies of India, and this alleges some form of bilingualism, since the coins have Greek on one side, and an Indian Prakrit, written in Kharo⋅⃛hi script (another derivate of Aramaic script), on the other. In fact, Greek legends on coins continued for a century after the death of the last Greek king and queen, Hermaios and Calliope, who had ruled little more than Peshawar and the Khyber pass, and died about 30 BC. Since the government was by then in the hands of Śaka/Scythians, Pallava/Parthians and Kushāna, whose own (Iranian) languages stemmed from north of the Hindu Kush, this might argue for a persisting public of Greek speakers; but the Kharo⋅⃛hi Indian inscriptions on the coins continue too, so it might simply be an attempt to put the weight of tradition and continuity behind the currency, even as the real power moved into the hands of illiterate rulers.

总体而言，希腊语政府对持续使用印度语言的民众影响甚微。尽管双方都识字，但没有双语语法或词典的记录；也没有记载最著名的希腊国王米南德（印度人称之为弥兰陀）与圣人那先那就佛教进行辩论时所使用的语言，这场辩论被记录在《弥兰陀辩经》中。或许当时讲普拉克利特语的希腊人也并非个例。不久之后，来自塔克西拉国王安提阿尔基达斯的使节赫利奥多罗斯在（今中央邦的贝斯纳加尔）竖立了一根石柱。石柱上的内容全部是用普拉克利特语书写的。¹⁵一百五十年前，麦加斯梯尼曾于公元前 302 年起担任塞琉古国王派往巴特那旃陀罗笈多宫廷的希腊大使，之后是来自下一任国王（安条克一世）的德伊马科斯，以及来自与希腊竞争的埃及的狄奥尼修斯；他们都撰写了关于自己经历的书籍，这些书籍在尼罗河畔的亚历山大港（当时希腊学术中心正在迅速崛起）广为流传。

Overall, the general picture is of a Greek-speaking government having relatively little impact on a populace persistently speaking Indian languages. Although both sides were literate, there is no record of bilingual grammars or dictionaries; and no account is given of what language was used when the most famous Greek king, Menander (Milinda to the Indians), engaged the sage Nagasena in a debate about Buddhism, recorded in the Milindapañha. Perhaps Prakrit-speaking Greeks were no great exception by then. Not long afterwards a pillar was erected (at Besnagar in modern Madhya Pradesh) by Heliodorus, an ambassador from King Antialkidas in Taxila. It is all in Prakrit.¹⁵ One hundred and fifty years earlier, Megasthenes had served as a Greek ambassador (sent by King Seleucus) at the court of Chandragupta in Patna from 302 BC, and he had been followed by Deimakhos from the next king (Antiochus I), and Dionysius, from the competing Greek domain of Egypt; all had written books about their experiences which became current in Alexandria on the Nile, now the fast-emerging centre of Greek learning.

在亚历山大的塞琉古继承者王国（波斯、新月沃地和安纳托利亚）中，有证据表明希腊语的传播比在印度更为广泛和深入，尽管情况并非完全一致。例如，尽管在伊朗东部地区，希腊势力在一个世纪内（约公元前230年）就被崛起的帕提亚人所取代，但新的统治者仍然继续发行希腊语（偶尔也发行阿拉姆语）的钱币，直到公元1世纪和2世纪才转而使用帕提亚语（巴列维语）铭文，因为当时剩余的希腊语铭文已经变得越来越混乱。甚至有官方文件一直使用希腊语写成，直到公元4世纪。 ¹⁶但在更南边的波斯湾沿岸，波斯小王国（公元前280年至公元224年存在）始终发行阿拉姆语钱币。

Back in the kingdom of the Seleucid successors to Alexander (Persia, the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia), there is evidence that Greek became ingrained more widely and deeply than in India, though the picture is not uniform. For instance, although in the eastern area of Iran Greek power yielded within a century (c.230 BC) to the rising Parthians, the new rulers continued to issue their coins in Greek (occasionally too in Aramaic), only going over to Parthian (Pahlavi) legends in the first and second centuries AD, when the remaining Greek legends were becoming increasingly garbled. There are official documents written in Greek up until the fourth century.¹⁶ But farther south, on the Persian Gulf, the small kingdom of Persis (in existence from 280 BC to AD 224) always issued its coins in Aramaic.

在肥沃新月地带、巴比伦尼亚、美索不达米亚、叙利亚和巴勒斯坦，这些曾经是亚述帝国核心的阿拉姆语地区，后来成为新塞琉古王朝的真正中心，希腊语的渗透同样显著，但似乎导致了相对稳定的双语现象，即不同社群的人们出于不同目的使用不同的语言。巴比伦虽然对塞琉古王朝具有重要的战略意义，但可能从未拥有过规模较大的希腊社群，而且在公元126年巴比伦割让给帕提亚之后，希腊人及其语言不太可能继续繁荣发展。埃德萨（今乌尔法）位于帕提亚边境，在希腊和罗马时期一直保持着强大的阿拉姆语（叙利亚语）文学传统。

In the Fertile Crescent, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, the Aramaic-speaking lands at the core of the old Assyrian empire, which became the actual centre of gravity of the new Seleucid government, the penetration of Greek was likewise significant, but seems to have led to a situation of more or less stable diglossia, people using different languages in different communities and for different purposes. Babylon, despite its strategic importance to the Seleucids, probably never had more than a small Greek community, and they and their language are unlikely to have flourished after the city was yielded to Parthia in AD 126. Edessa, modern Urfa, which came to be on the border with Parthia, maintained a strong Aramaic (Syriac) literary tradition throughout the Greek and Roman periods.

然而，在叙利亚北部，塞琉古一世曾认真尝试建立希腊殖民地，这些殖民地大多保存至今：安条克（安塔基亚）、阿帕米亚（哈马）、塞琉西亚（西利夫凯）和拉迪西亚（拉塔基亚）。位于地中海沿岸的安条克后来成为罗马叙利亚的首都，并取得了辉煌的成就。安条克最初由5300名雅典人和马其顿人组成，他们是从附近的一个希腊殖民地迁徙而来。尽管如此，安条克始终拥有庞大的阿拉姆语社群以及犹太社群。附近的帕尔米拉似乎要归功于罗马的统治（公元17-19年），它拥有了希腊语使用者（以及它的名字——它以前叫塔德莫尔）；在那里发现了一块著名的希腊语-阿拉姆语关税铭文（公元137年），表明这两种语言都具有一定的地位。但九百年后，当希腊的统治被阿拉伯征服所终结时，希腊语似乎从未在这些少数几个城市之外传播开来。¹⁷

However, round northern Syria, Seleucus I made a serious attempt at establishing Greek colonies, which have by and large survived to the present day: Antioch (Antakya), Apamea (Hamah), Seleuceia (Silifke), and Laodiceia (Latakia). Antioch on the Mediterranean coast, which went on to a glorious career as capital of Roman Syria, started with a core of 5300 Athenians and Macedonians transplanted from a nearby Greek colony. Nevertheless, they always had a large Aramaic-speaking, as well as a Jewish, community. Nearby Palmyra seems to owe its Greek speakers (and its name—it was previously Tadmor) to the advent of Roman control (AD 17-19); and there is a famous Greek-Aramaic inscription on tariffs (AD 137) found there, to show that both languages had status. But nine hundred years later, when Greek control was ended by the Arab conquest, it appears that Greek had never spread outside these few cities.¹⁷

公元前168年，耶路撒冷爆发了一场由犹大·马加比领导的重大动乱，^*起因是犹太人反抗塞琉古政府试图将犹太人希腊化的举措。不出所料，宗教信仰而非语言问题才是这场动乱的焦点。这场动乱最终导致了哈斯蒙尼王国的建立，该王国于公元前142年至公元前63年统治犹太地区，最大限度地减少了希腊的影响。阿拉姆语仍然是巴勒斯坦的主要语言，希伯来语则仅限于宗教仪式使用。有趣的是，希腊语在犹太人的国际化进程中扮演了重要角色，并影响了基督教等衍生群体。但正如《使徒行传》第二章生动地记载，在逾越节期间，耶路撒冷的街头巷尾可以听到罗马帝国境内所有仍在使用的语言。†

In Jerusalem, there was major trouble beginning in 168, led by Judas Maccabaeus,^* involving resistance to the Seleucid government’s perceived measures to Hellenise the Jews, although unsurprisingly the religious cult rather than the language aspect was to the fore. It led to the setting up of the Hasmonaean kingdom, which ruled Judaea from 142 to 63 BC, minimising Greek influence. Aramaic remained the dominant language in Palestine, with Hebrew restricted to liturgical use, and Greek interestingly assigned a role in the more cosmopolitan aspect of Jewry, and such spin-offs as the Christians. But as Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2, graphically recounts, every language still spoken in the Roman empire could be heard in the streets of Jerusalem at the time of the Passover festival.†

事实上，希伯来圣经的希腊文文本是由托勒密二世委托翻译的，他是亚历山大死后统治埃及的希腊王朝的第二位君主（公元前308-246年在位）。这一过程在亚历山大的《阿里斯提亚斯书信》中有详细记载，其中也夹杂着一些传说。无论真相如何，希腊文七十士译本（以七十二位据称从耶路撒冷召集而来参与翻译的学者命名，并以拉丁文命名）成为了圣经的权威文本，并被巴勒斯坦以外的犹太人以及后来的基督教运动广泛使用。因此，希腊语成为一种超越自身传统、摆脱了与雅典的辉煌（或如今的马其顿的荣耀）联系的主流文化的载体，并在某种意义上实现了语言的世俗化。从实际角度来看，在后来的几个世纪里，当人们感到需要新的基督教经文向更广阔的世界传播时，它就能够获得与亚兰语同等的地位，然后又获得更高的地位。

Greek texts of the Hebrew scriptures were in fact commissioned by Ptolemy II,§ the second in the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander’s death. (He ruled 308-246 BC) The process by which this was achieved is detailed, with some legendary accretions, in the Alexandrian ‘Letter of Aristeas’. Whatever the true details, the Greek Septuagint (named—in Latin—for the seventy-two scholars supposedly summoned from Jerusalem to work on it) became an authoritative text of the Bible, and was widely used by Jews outside Palestine, as well as the later Christian movement. Greek therefore became the vehicle for a major culture outside its own traditions, freed from associations with Athenian eleuthería (or by now Macedonian magnificence), and in a sense thereby secularised as a language. On pragmatic grounds, it became able, when in later centuries the need was felt for new Christian scriptures to transmit to the wider world, to assume equivalent, and then superior, status to Aramaic.

在整个埃及，尽管托勒密王朝如同所有希腊化的亚历山大继承者一样，依靠军队来巩固其统治，但一项重要的文化工程也随之启动，以巩固其权威。一座博物馆（缪斯神庙）作为政府资助的研究机构建立，以及举世闻名的图书馆，都毗邻新都亚历山大的王宫。这些机构吸引了来自世界各地（即当时的希腊语世界）的学者。钱币也全部由亚历山大的单一铸币厂以希腊语铸造。在这个拥有世界上最悠久中央集权传统的国家，希腊语逐渐成为新的行政语言。

In Egypt as a whole, although the Ptolemies, like all the Hellenistic Diadochi (diádokhoi—heirs of Alexander), relied on their armies to guarantee their authority, there was a major cultural project started to validate it. A Museum (Mouseĩon—temple of the Muses) was established as a government-funded research institute, and the eternally famous Library, both close to the royal palace in Alexandria, the newly founded capital city. These attracted Greek-speaking scholars from all over the oikouménē, the inhabited world. Coinage was issued in Greek, from a single mint, also at Alexandria. Greek was gradually introduced as a new language of administration, in this country with the longest tradition of central administration in the world.

希腊语似乎一直是埃及统治精英的语言。尽管亚历山大港的文学作品（数量众多）发展出新的散文和诗歌体裁，描绘日常生活的生动景象，但这些作品所描绘的日常生活场景似乎总是发生在别处，更符合传统的希腊风格，例如爱琴海诸岛，或者叙拉古。据说，托勒密王朝的最后一位君主克利奥帕特拉（公元前51年至公元前30年在位）是第一个学习埃及语的人。^因此，学习埃及语仍然很有价值；即使在希腊统治三百年之后，埃及语仍然是当时的通用语言。

Greek seems to have remained a language for the ruling elite in Egypt. Although the literature that came out of Alexandria (which is copious) developed new genres for talking in prose and verse about picturesque features of everyday life, the everyday life talked about always seems to be somewhere else, more traditionally Greek, such as in the Aegean islands or perhaps in Syracuse. The last of the Ptolemies, Cleopatra, who ruled from 51 to 30 BC, is said to have been the first of them to learn Egyptian.¹⁸ So it was still worth learning; the popular language, even after three hundred years of Greek government, was still Egyptian.

由于纸莎草纸的普遍使用，以及远离尼罗河谷干燥土壤的良好保存作用，这里古代书信的文献比古代世界其他任何地方都更为丰富。这些文献偶尔能让我们窥见希腊移民圈子之外的人们是如何看待希腊语的。例如，公元前三世纪中期，也就是征服之后的几代人，一封写给法尤姆地区卡里亚农场经理泽农的信中（用希腊语）抱怨说，他因为不会说希腊语，或者更确切地说，因为不会“希腊化”（hellēnízein）而受到鄙视。

Documentation of actual ancient correspondence is more copious here than anywhere else in the ancient world, because of the general use of papyrus, and the preservative power of the dry soils away from the Nile valley. These give occasional glimpses of how the use of Greek was perceived from outside the charmed circle of the immigrant Hellenes. So in the mid-third century BC, a couple of generations after the conquest, a letter to Zenon, the Carian manager of a farm in the Fayŭm, complains (in Greek) that he is despised because he cannot speak Greek, or literally ‘Hellenise’ (hellēnízein).

从某种意义上说，新秩序生效后变化最小的地区是安纳托利亚。但它的转变却是亚历山大新征服的行省中最持久的。我们从铭文和钱币中得知，阿拉姆语在安纳托利亚的传播程度不一：在西里西亚（与叙利亚故乡接壤的东南部地区）最为普遍，在西南沿海地区、吕底亚和弗里吉亚最为薄弱，而在黑海沿岸地区，阿拉姆语与希腊语以双语形式存在。（参见第三章“阿拉姆语——沙漠之歌：西亚的通用语”，第78页。）希腊人至少在一千年来一直是边缘地带的一支重要力量。如今，他们已遍布各地，建立了D. Musti所说的“军事君主制”，但同时又给予“城邦（póleis）特权，并大肆宣扬其自由和民主（eleuthería kaì dēmokratía）”。 ¹⁹

In a way, the area least changed immediately by the new dispensation was Anatolia. But its conversion was to be the most long-lasting among Alexander’s new provinces. We know from inscriptions and coins that the penetration of Aramaic had been variable here: strongest in Cilicia (the south-eastern region bordering its homeland in Syria), weakest on the southwestern coasts, Lydia and Phrygia, and with some presence in bilingualism with Greek on the Black Sea. (See Chapter 3, ‘Aramaic—the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia’, p. 78.) The Greeks had been an influential presence on the periphery for at least a thousand years. They were now installed throughout, in what D. Musti calls a ‘military monarchy’, but allowing ‘a privileged relationship for cities (póleis) and a much-trumpeted respect for their freedom and democracy (eleuthería kaì dēmokratía).’¹⁹

尽管塞琉古王朝的希腊统治仅持续了两百余年便被罗马人取代，但语言状况却发展得更为稳定。在接下来的千年里，希腊语持续传播，逐渐取代了南部沿海和内陆地区的当地语言。例如，尽管我们仍能发现公元三世纪的弗里吉亚语铭文，但公元二世纪当地农民献给宙斯的祭祀牌（由于多基米翁采石场出产的大理石边角料，即使是穷人也能购买）却全部是用希腊语书写的^。

Although the Greek administration of the Seleucids was not to last more than two hundred years before yielding to the Romans, the language situation was much more consistent. For the next thousand years, Greek spread relentlessly, supplanting the local languages of the south coast and the interior. One example: although we still find inscriptions in Phrygian until the third century AD, local peasants’ votive tablets to Zeus (available even to poor people because of the availability of marble offcuts from the quarry at Dokimeion) are from the second century AD all in Greek.²⁰

希腊语突然向东传播，其中蕴含着一种隐秘的对称性。在整个古波斯帝国，阿拉姆语一直是希腊语的主要竞争对手，而阿拉姆语与腓尼基语（拉丁语称之为布匿语）——希腊语在地中海西岸殖民世界的主要竞争对手——却有着密切的亲缘关系。事实上，这两种闪米特语系的姐妹语言起源于相距不到百里的地方，它们的中心分别位于叙利亚北部西部的推罗和中部的大马士革。仿佛从赫拉克勒斯之柱以北的加的斯到印度河畔的整个地区，都成了希腊通用语与闪米特双生姐妹语言联盟之间简单二元竞争的战场。

And there was a hidden symmetry in this sudden spread of Greek into the east, for the Aramaic that remained Greek’s principal competitor throughout the old Persian empire was a close relative of the Phoenician or, in Latin, Punic language, Greek’s main competitor in the colonial world of the Mediterranean’s western shores. Indeed, the two Semitic sisters had originated within a hundred miles of each other, their foci at Tyre and Damascus, in the west and centre of northern Syria. It was as if the entire region from Cadiz beyond the Pillars of Heracles to the banks of the Indus was now the field for a simple two-sided competition, between the Greek koinē and an alliance of Semitic twin sisters.

不出所料，以希腊人的自私自利，他们根本没注意到^。

As one might expect from the self-centred Greeks, they never noticed.^*

罗马式的欢迎：希腊文化的传播

A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture

希腊 Capta Ferum Victorem cepit et artes | Induit agresti Latio…

Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes | Induit agresti Latio…

希腊一旦被征服，便反过来征服了其野蛮的征服者，并将艺术注入了粗俗的罗马……

Greece, once captured, captured its wild conqueror, and instilled arts into boorish Rome…

贺拉斯，《书信集》，第二卷，第一章，第156节

Horace, Letters, ii. 1.156

在希腊语通过移民和渗透而进行的两次大规模传播中——地中海沿岸的殖民以及亚历山大闪电征服东方——语言及其文化的声望几乎没有起到任何作用。希腊人探索并定居；希腊人征服并定居。但因此而首次接触希腊语的新居民对此几乎别无选择。希腊语的使用范围由此迅速扩展；但除了安纳托利亚、叙利亚和埃及之外，几乎没有证据表明希腊语的日常使用在希腊移民群体之外广泛传播。

In these two major spreads of Greek by migration and infiltration, the colonisation of Mediterranean coasts, and the results of Alexander’s lightning conquest of the east, the prestige of the language and its culture played little, if any, role. Greeks had explored and settled; Greeks had conquered and settled. But the new populations who first heard Greek in consequence had little choice in the matter. A vast expansion of the world where Greek was spoken had come about in this way; but outside Anatolia, Syria and Egypt there is little evidence for its everyday use having spread much beyond the community of Greek émigrés.

然而，希腊语正蓄势待发，即将迎来一次大规模的传播。在整个地中海地区，尤其是在新兴的罗马帝国的精英阶层中，希腊文化即将成为教育课程的核心。

Greek was poised, however, for a major surge of spread by diffusion. All round the Mediterranean, above all among the elite of the rising power of Rome, Greek culture was about to become the centre of the educational curriculum.

希腊人不可避免地在地中海沿岸拥有文化优势，他们带来了字母，并展现了希腊式的文明社会风貌：正规教育、以诗歌经典（尤其是荷马史诗）为基础的课程以及积极的演讲技巧训练。公元前三世纪，一系列政治事件促使讲希腊语的东地中海地区与西地中海地区建立了密切联系。公元前280年，来自希腊西部伊庇鲁斯的皮洛士试图入侵意大利和西西里岛：他最初的胜利是惨胜，五年之内便被罗马顽强抵抗的军队击退，但罗马军队随后进驻了意大利南部所有希腊城邦。公元前273年，埃及国王托勒密二世与罗马签订条约，巩固了埃及作为地中海新兴强国的地位。

Inevitably, the Greeks began with a cultural advantage on Mediterranean coasts, having brought the alphabet, and some display of what a literate society was like, Greek-style, with formal education and a curriculum based on a corpus of poetical classics (notably Homer) and active training in skills of public speaking. Then, in the third century BC, a number of political events brought the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean into active contact with the west. In 280 BC Pyrrhus (coming from Epirus, in western Greece) had tried to invade Italy and Sicily: his initial victories were proverbially pyrrhic, and within five years he was effectively seen off by dogged Roman resistance, but Roman garrisons were then placed in all the Greek cities of southern Italy. In 273 BC King Ptolemy II of Egypt entered into a treaty with Rome, sealing their new status as a coming power in the Mediterranean.

双语作家开始在希腊和罗马文学之间架起桥梁。公元前240年起，希腊戏剧（以拉丁语译本）便在罗马上演。另一些作家，如李维·安德罗尼库斯，则尝试将《奥德赛》等希腊经典作品改编成适合罗马观众的作品，但他们采用的是传统的罗马语言和诗歌形式。公元前10世纪末，与汉尼拔的战争进入了紧张时期：胜利之后，希腊文化风靡一时。（胜利的将军普布利乌斯·科尔内利乌斯·西庇阿是出了名的希腊文化爱好者。）诗人恩尼乌斯是其中的领军人物。他成长于意大利南部，从小说希腊语，但在服兵役期间学习了拉丁语：他将希腊作品和文学价值观融入拉丁语教育的核心，开启了拉丁文学完全按照希腊模式重塑的进程。

Bilingual authors began building a bridge between Greek and Roman literature. Greek plays were performed (in Latin translation) at Rome from 240 BC. Others, such as Livius Andronicus, tried adapting Greek master works such as the Odyssey for Roman audiences, but using traditional Roman language and patterns of verse. Late in the century came the tense days of the war with Hannibal: victory was followed by a vogue for Greek culture. (The victorious general, Publius Cornelius Scipio, was a notorious enthusiast for things Greek.) A leading figure was the poet Ennius, who had grown up speaking Greek in southern Italy, but learnt Latin during his army service: he brought Greek works and literary values into the heart of Latin education, beginning the refashioning of Latin literature on completely Greek lines.

外交政策强化了罗马对希腊的文化兴趣，因为在接下来的一个世纪里，罗马对希腊进行了果断的干预，并利用了一次泛希腊运动会，这在当时引起了广泛关注。公元前196年，罗马将军弗拉米尼努斯在科林斯地峡运动会上向一群难以置信的民众宣布，所有希腊城邦从此获得自由，这要归功于罗马元老院和人民。随后，一系列错综复杂的战争爆发，罗马越来越深地卷入希腊事务，最终导致亚历山大在希腊和亚洲的继承者们走向衰落。到公元前196年末，整个希腊和安纳托利亚西部都处于罗马的直接统治之下。

Foreign policy reinforced the cultural interest, since Rome intervened decisively in Greece in the next century, famously taking advantage of one of the pan-Hellenic athletic meetings. In 196 BC the Roman general Flamininus announced to an incredulous crowd gathered for the Isthmian Games at Corinth that all the Greek cities were henceforth free, courtesy of the Roman Senate and people. There followed a complicated series of wars in which Rome was involved ever more deeply in Greek affairs, and which led to the downfall of the successors of Alexander in both Greece and Asia. By the end of the century, the whole of Greece and the west of Anatolia were under direct Roman rule.

其结果是希腊文化完全渗透到罗马文化中，以至于在接下来的五百年里，直到希腊帝国东部与罗马帝国西部分离之前，受过良好教育的罗马人几乎都能说一口流利的希腊语。罗马人的教育基本上遵循希腊模式，但特别注重诗歌和演讲技巧，而音乐和体育方面则相对被忽视。家庭教师和学校教师通常都是希腊裔的双语人士；其结果之一是，对性格开朗、受过良好教育的希腊人始终有着稳定的需求，他们可以在整个地中海地区找到教育工作。总的来说，这种情况与如今英语国家毕业生在富裕的非英语国家就业的前景类似。受过教育的希腊人常常发现，他们的语言就是他们的财富。

The outcome was a total penetration of Greek into Roman culture, so that for the next five hundred years, essentially until the Greek east was split off from the Roman west of the empire, well-educated Romans could be counted on to be bilingual in Greek. Romans came to be educated basically on a Greek pattern, but with a strong emphasis on poetry and the practice of public speaking: the musical and gymnastic sides were rather neglected. The tutors and schoolmasters were typically bilinguals of Greek extraction; and one effect was a permanent demand for personable educated Greeks, who could find employment as educators all over the Mediterranean. Overall, the situation was comparable to the prospects for graduates from English-speaking countries in rich non-English speaking countries today. Educated Greeks often found that their language was their fortune.

例如，公元前一世纪，高卢的显贵们会将子女送到马萨利亚（今马赛）接受希腊语教育。斯特拉波记载，“诡辩家们像医生一样，既有私人聘用，也有由城邦出资聘用的”。 ²¹与此同时，富裕的罗马精英家庭也普遍将子女送往雅典或罗德岛完成学业。但这并不意味着只有上层阶级才掌握希腊语。公元前二世纪初，普劳图斯在创作喜剧时，将大部分希腊语借词和俚语用在了奴隶和下层阶级的口中，例如graphicus servus——一个形象完美的奴隶。 ²²

As one example, in the first century BC Gaulish notables were sending their children to be educated in Greek in Massalia (Marseilles). Strabo says that ‘sophists were employed, both privately and at the city’s expense, just like medical doctors’.²¹ Meanwhile it became usual for elite Romans of rich families to send their young people to Athens or Rhodes to finish their education. But this does not mean that knowledge of Greek was found only among the upper classes. Plautus, writing comedies in the early second century BC, puts most of his Greek loan words and slang into the mouths of slaves and low types: graphicus servus—the picture-perfect slave.²²

波利比乌斯在一代人之后写道，或许是出于对现状的乐观态度：“我们希腊的行动派人士已经摆脱了政治或军事野心的压力，因此他们有很多机会从事调查或研究。” ²³

Polybius, writing a generation later, could remark, perhaps making the best of things: ‘our men of action in Greece have been released from the pressures of political or military ambition, and so have plenty of opportunities to pursue inquiries or research’.²³

一个世纪后，维吉尔从罗马人的视角更明确地阐述了这一隐含的契约：²⁴

A century later, the implicit compact was stated more explicitly, from the Roman point of view, by Vergil:²⁴

其他人将锻造出更精巧、会呼吸的青铜

（我毫不怀疑），将栩栩如生地从大理石上雕刻出人脸，

将更好地进行法庭辩护，并将用尺子测量

天空的运行轨迹和星座的升起；

而你，罗马人，一心想统治人民

（这些技艺将属于你），推行和平之道，

宽恕被征服者，并击败骄傲者。

others will hammer out more finely bronze that breathes

(I do not doubt), will draw from marble faces live,

will plead court cases better, and use rod to measure out

the wanderings of the sky and constellations’ rise;

you, Roman, mind to rule peoples at your command

(these arts will be yours), to impose the way of peace,

to spare the conquered, and to battle down the proud.

艺术和科学领域无疑是希腊的领地。但权力和秩序则属于罗马。地中海世界的文明逐渐演变为稳定的希腊罗马混合体^。

The world of the arts and sciences was the Greek province, par excellence. But the world of power and order belonged to Rome. The civilisation of the Mediterranean world became a stable Graeco-Roman mix.^*

值得花些时间思考一下希腊及其相关文化、性格或精神（这两个词都源自希腊语）的真正吸引力所在。罗马人当然不认为他们能从这些能言善辩、富有创新精神的外国人身上学到多少关于传统美德的知识，尤其是在战争、法律和政治方面。† 希腊艺术随着军队在意大利南部和希腊的征战而广为人知，其本身就极具吸引力；但希腊人在追求更广泛意义上的享乐方面似乎也更胜一筹：美食、美酒、音乐、与男女的嬉戏。希腊人是奢华的行家，而想要拥有更多这样的享受，并不需要多么高深的鉴赏力。拉丁语单词pergraecārī（意为“沉迷于希腊”）指的并非崇尚高尚的思想，而是沉迷于奢靡的生活、宴饮和饮酒^。25

It is worth spending a moment to consider what was the real attraction of Greek, and its associated culture, its character or ethos (both Greek words). The Romans certainly did not believe that they had much to learn about traditional virtues, as shown in war, law and politics, from these voluble and innovative foreigners.† Greek art, which had become familiar through the army’s campaigns in southern Italy and Greece, was attractive in itself; but the Greeks also seemed to have an advantage in the pursuit of pleasure more generally: haute cuisine, wine, music, frolics with either sex. The Greeks were the masters of luxury, and it took little higher discernment to want more of this. The Latin word pergraecārī, ‘to Greek off’, meant devotion not to high thinking but to high living, feasting and drinking.²⁵

与此同时，希腊人渊博的知识也令罗马人印象深刻：他们不仅熟知自身历史，也了解邻国的历史；他们能就任何话题进行理论探讨，还能引经据典地引用几个世纪前的诗歌。最重要的是，他们口才极佳，极具说服力：他们接受过专业的训练，懂得如何吸引听众，并能左右人们的行动。这种精湛的修辞技巧在罗马人建立的公民社会中至关重要，因为在罗马社会中，从村委会到共和国，各级官员的竞选层出不穷，所有议案都需以口头形式提交公民大会审议通过。

At the same time, the sheer knowledge possessed by the Greeks impressed the Romans: Greeks knew their own history, as well as that of their neighbours, they could theorise on any topic, and provide quotations from poetry centuries old. Above all, they were fluent and convincing speakers: they had been trained in how to hold an audience, and get people to do what they wanted. This explicit skill in rhetoric was highly in demand in the civic society that the Romans had created, where people were constantly running for office at every level from village council to the republic itself, and measures were presented orally for approval by assemblies.

最重要的是，我们可以看到罗马人（以及整个地中海世界）被一种规模庞大、高度发达的文化所散发的精湛技艺所深深吸引，这种文化自信到近乎自负的地步。当梵语和古典印度的奇迹席卷东南亚海岸时，也发生了类似的情况（参见第五章“梵语的传播”，第201页）；或者当法语在17至19世纪成为整个欧洲，尤其是俄罗斯的优雅语言时，也发生了类似的情况（参见第十一章“法语国家”，第410页）。如今，这种大胆而宏大的自信魅力，也推动着全世界对美国文化的追捧，以及英语的流行。正如这些例子所示，其背后的声望并非仅仅源于与一支强大的军队或一个繁荣的经济的联系。

Above all, we can see the Romans (and hence the whole Mediterranean world) attracted by the sheer sense of savoir-faire generated by a large-scale and highly elaborated culture, self-confident to the point of solipsism. Much the same thing was to happen when Sanskrit and the wonders of classical India washed up on the shores of South-East Asia (see Chapter 5, ‘The spread of Sanskrit’, p. 201); or when French became the language of refinement throughout Europe, and especially in Russia, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (see Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 410). Something of the same charm of brash, large-scale self-confidence can be seen today powering the worldwide taste for Americana, and with it the English language. And as these examples show, the prestige behind it is something other than association with a successful army, or a successful economy.

中年危机：尝试开启新的篇章

Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning

eukharisteĩn oudeĩs t$oTbar;n dokím$oTn eĩpen, allà khárin eidénai。

eukharisteĩn oudeĩs t$oTbar;n dokím$oTn eĩpen, allà khárin eidénai.

古典文学中没有一句是“eukharisteĩn”（意思是“谢谢”），而是“khárin eidénai”。

None of the classics said ’eukharisteĩn’ (meaning ‘thank’) but ’khárin eidénai’.

Phrynichus Arabius，v.6（公元二世纪）

Phrynichus Arabius, v.6 (second century AD)

圣餐$oTbar; t$oTbar;i thé$oTbar;i pántote perì hum$oTbar;n, epì tŋbar;i kháriti to$uT theo$uT dot-heísēi humĩn en Khrist$oTbar;i Iēso$uT。

eukharist$oTbar; t$oTbar;i thé$oTbar;i pántote perì hum$oTbar;n, epì tŋbar;i kháriti to$uT theo$uT dot-heísēi humĩn en Khrist$oTbar;i Iēso$uT.

我常常感谢上帝，感谢祂在耶稣基督里赐予你的恩典。

I thank (eukharist$oTbar;) God always for you, for the grace of God given to you in Jesus Christ.

圣保罗，《哥林多前书》，1.4（公元1世纪）

St Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians, i.4 (first century AD)

希腊语使用者一直以来都非常重视他们的文学遗产，这也是希腊语尽管曾经广泛分布于世界各地，却能在几个世纪以来保持统一的原因之一。但他们对文学遗产的理解始终非常狭隘，与其说是将其视为一种鲜活的传统，不如说是将其视为一套一成不变（且遥不可及）的经典作家典籍，即公元前五至四世纪雅典（“阿提卡”）的主要作家^。

Greek speakers have always held particularly strongly to their literary heritage, and this is one reason why their language has remained unitary over so many centuries, despite once being so widely spread around the world. But they have always interpreted it extremely narrowly, not so much as a living tradition, but as an unchanging (and unattainable) canon of classic authors, the main Athenian (’Attic’) writers of the fifth and fourth centuries BC^*

这为教育奠定了清晰的基础，也为写作和正式演讲提供了范例。但这同时也意味着，一旦语言开始变化（而语言的变化是必然的），真正优美的文风便难以企及（而且也越来越难以理解）。因此，从公元前三世纪起，正确的措辞与古板的迂腐之风便难以区分。在某种程度上，这可以被视为一种精英主义政策，尤其是在当时地中海和近东地区广泛使用的希腊语中：当没有人能自然而然地掌握最纯正的希腊语时，母语者和第二语言学习者之间的水平更加接近。但更重要的是，这意味着任何缺乏深厚文学底蕴的人都无法被视为有教养的人。希腊语历来盛行辩论文化，“阿提卡主义”的推崇在过去2500年间饱受质疑、批评、戏仿和抨击——但这一切都无济于事。

This provided a clear basis for education, and a model for writing and formal speech. But it meant that really good style was unattainable (and increasingly unintelligible) once the language had begun to change, as of course it immediately did. So, from the third century BC, correct diction was never distinguishable from archaising pedantry. To some extent, this can be seen as a meritocratic policy in a language that was being used all round the Mediterranean and Near East: native speakers and second-language learners were more on a par when nobody was a natural speaker of the best Greek. But more importantly, it implied that nobody without an extensive literary background would ever be accepted as cultured. Greek has always fostered a disputatious culture, and the cult of ‘Atticism’ has been queried, criticised, parodied and reviled throughout the last 2500 years—but all to no avail.

正如我们所见，并非没有其他标准，一种更为普遍、更为通俗的标准：阿提卡希腊语几乎立即衍生出更易于理解的通用希腊语（koinébar），其形式接近阿提卡希腊语，用法明确，且在任何讲希腊语的地方都能被理解。然而，尽管通用希腊语实用性强，却缺乏阶级性。在前现代社会，社会地位与识字能力息息相关——而如果没有大众教育，识字永远只是少数人的特权——这一点至关重要。

As we have seen, it was not as if there was no other standard, of a more de facto, indeed demotic, nature: Attic Greek had almost immediately given rise to the more accessible koinébar;, close to Attic in its forms, defined in usage, and intelligible wherever Greek was spoken. But for all its utility, it had no class. And in the pre-modern world where status was bound up with literacy—and without mass education literacy would always be for the few—this mattered.

然而，偶尔也会出现一种反向的势利眼。希腊语在罗马帝国传播开来，其受众不再局限于受过教育的精英阶层。罗马的犹太社群直到公元四世纪仍在使用希腊语。 ²⁶公元第一个千年的最初几个世纪，一些神秘宗教从东部行省、埃及、叙利亚和亚洲传播开来，其中最著名的当属伊西斯教、密特拉教和耶稣基督教。所有这些宗教都采用希腊语作为其仪式语言。 ²⁷它们首先吸引的是帝国的贫苦民众。对于所有这些宗教而言，希腊古典经典的权威——即便其中存在神祇，也只是奥林匹斯山上虚构的居民——根本算不上权威。

Occasionally, though, a kind of inverted snobbery prevailed. The Greek language had spread round the Roman empire to others than the educated elite. The Jewish community in Rome spoke Greek until the fourth century AD.²⁶ In the early centuries of the first millennium AD, a number of mystery religions were spreading from the eastern provinces, Egypt, Syria and Asia, most famously the cults of Isis, Mithras and Jesus Christ. All adopted Greek as their ritual language.²⁷ They were attracting converts first among the poor and downtrodden of the empire. And for all of them, the authority of the Greek classics, whose gods, if any, were the imagined residents of Mount Olympus, was no authority at all.

^{然而，至少对基督教而言，这并不意味着他们否定了书面文学的权威。基督教起源于犹太传统，很快便开始书写并认可自己的经文，主要以希腊语写成，尽管后来也出现了用叙利亚的阿拉姆语、埃及的科普特语和埃塞俄比亚的吉兹语写成的方言文本——当然还有拉丁语。早期基督徒似乎普遍选择语言是为了最大限度地方便传播，而没有考虑任何特定语言体系的特权地位。}但这同时也意味着希腊文学新经典的诞生，而且是四百年来首次基于大众使用而形成的。

Yet, for Christianity at least, this did not mean that they rejected the authority of written literature. With its origins in the Jewish tradition, the Christian faith soon began writing and recognising its own scriptures, primarily in Greek, although later there were vernacular texts written in Aramaic in Syria, Coptic in Egypt and Ge’ez in Ethiopia—and of course Latin. Language for the early Christians seems universally to have been chosen to maximise access, without thought for the privileged status of any particular code. But this meant that there was the beginning of a new canon for Greek literature, and one based—for the first time in four centuries—on popular usage.^*

我们之前已经提到过“信仰之盾”现象，即宗教，特别是源自西亚的宗教，如何促进了其传播媒介语言的存续。在早期，希腊语几乎不需要基督教的帮助，但许多人为了更好地接触希腊文学，必然会选择希腊语作为第二语言。基督教也确实拓展了希腊文学的范畴，将修辞学转化为讲道或布道的艺术，并将哲学转化为神学。

We have already remarked on the ‘Shield of Faith’ phenomenon, the way in which religions, particularly those of west Asian origin, have contributed to the survival of the languages that were their vehicles. Greek hardly needed any help from Christianity in these early years, but many must have taken up Greek as a second language in order to get better access to its literature. And Christianity did effect some extensions to the range of Greek literature, transforming rhetoric into the art of the homily or sermon,† and philosophy into theology.

事实上，这些扩张往往抵消了最初由新的非正式文学带来的希腊语语言意义的转变。基督教在此成为了自身成功的受害者。在其扩张时期，维持帝国庞大的统一行政体系（涵盖西欧和整个地中海地区）变得越来越困难。统治者们寻求一种新的方式来巩固对广袤领土的忠诚。君士坦丁大帝的主要洞见在于，他认为基督教正是这种新途径。公元330年，他围绕拜占庭（此后称为君士坦丁堡，Kōnstantinoúpolis）的新都城重组了日益区域化的帝国，并将其确立为基督教的都城。

These extensions in fact tended to undo the change to Greek linguistic sense that was at first brought about by the new informal literature. Here Christianity was a victim of its own success. In the time of its growth, the struggle to maintain the empire’s vast edifice of a single administration for western Europe and the whole Mediterranean was becoming harder and harder. Rulers looked for a new means of securing loyalty over the vast domains. The major insight of the emperor Constantine was that this could be found in Christianity. In 330 he reorganised an increasingly regionalised empire around a new capital at Byzantium, henceforth Constantinople (Kōnstantinoúpolis), and he made it a Christian foundation.

这标志着基督教社会进步的巅峰。一个多世纪以来，它开始吸引一种新型的皈依者。例如，亚历山大的克莱门特（生于公元150年）运用其深厚的古典教育，撰写了《劝勉者》（ Protreptikós），试图劝说希腊人放弃异教信仰，皈依基督教，随后又在基督教逻辑的基础上构建了一套逻辑体系。奥利金（185-255）是《圣经》的文本批判家，优西比乌（260-339）则是教会史的第一位作者。这些典型的希腊学者完全能够以古典风格写作。但如今，教会也开始吸引那些在世俗世界中寻求晋升，或仅仅是想彰显其显赫家族成员身份的人。其结果是，教会彻底回归了旧有的阿提卡化倾向。教会希腊语在古典传统中得到稳固的复兴，此后再未偏离过这一传统。帝国日益倾向于取缔异教，其定义涵盖所有基督教之前的哲学思想，最终导致查士丁尼于公元前529年关闭了雅典学院。但阿提卡风格的传承从未受到质疑。

This set the crown on the social advancement of Christianity. For over a century it had begun to attract converts of a new kind. Clement of Alexandria (born in AD 150), for example, had used his extensive classical education to write a Protreptikós, or ‘Encourager’, attempting to argue Greeks out of paganism and into Christianity, and then went on to build a logical system on top of the Christian lógos. Origen (185-255) had been a textual critic of the Bible, and Eusebius (260-339) the first historian of the Church. Such characteristically Greek academics had been well able to write in the classical style. But now the Church would also attract the general ranks of those seeking preferment in the temporal world, or indeed simply seeking to assert their due as members of distinguished families. The result was a full-blooded return to the old Atticising tendency. Ecclesiastical Greek was firmly reinstated in the classical tradition, and was never again tempted to deviate from it. The empire’s increasing tendency to proscribe paganism, defined to include all pre-Christian philosophy, culminated in Justinian’s closure of the School of Athens in 529. But the survival of Attic style was never in doubt.

希腊人坚信，在书写方面，古老的方式才是最佳方式，这种信念与帝国本身一样根深蒂固。一千多年后的1453年，君士坦丁堡陷落于土耳其人之手时，人们仍在尝试用某种尚可接受的古典阿提卡体文字进行书写。

This conviction of Greeks that, in writing, the very old ways were the best ways turned out to be as deeply rooted as the empire itself. People were still attempting to write in some tolerable version of classical Attic when in 1453 the city of Constantinople fell to the Turks, over a thousand years later.

衰落的迹象

Intimations of decline

在接下来的千年里，希腊的历史是一部虽不频繁但却突如其来、规模巨大的后退史，公元前一千年后期积累的庞大版图被不断蚕食。在西地中海地区，希腊帝国从未真正建立过世俗帝国，希腊语社群的部分衰落仅仅是因为文化重心发生了转移：希腊语教育不再是西欧教育的一部分，与东方的交流也变得极为稀少。但在其他地区，这些后退则是由军事失败直接导致的。

The story of Greek for the next thousand years is one of infrequent, but sudden and massive, retrenchments, as the vast extent built up in the late first millennium BC was pushed back at the edges. In the western Mediterranean, where Greek’s empire had never been a temporal one, this loss of parts of the Greek language community came about simply because the focus of culture shifted: an education in Greek ceased to be part of western European education, and contacts with the east became much rarer. But elsewhere these withdrawals were caused quite directly by military defeats.

在拉丁语占主导地位的西罗马帝国，那些削弱并最终导致帝国政治灭亡的军事失败，对语言的影响却非常有限。（参见第七章“Einfall：日耳曼语和斯拉夫语的扩张”，第304页。）但在东方，战败的影响则简单得多。敌对势力接管了政权，经过一段相当长的时期——通常是几代人的时间——希腊语便从此销声匿迹。

In the West Roman Empire, where Latin was dominant, the military defeats that diminished and soon extinguished the empire politically were to have only very limited effects on language. (See Chapter 7, ‘Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances’, p. 304.) But in the east, the effect of the defeats was much simpler. Hostile forces took charge, and after a decent interval—often of many generations—Greek was no longer to be heard or seen.

巴克特里亚、波斯、美索不达米亚

Bactria, Persia, Mesopotamia

塞琉古王朝首先征服的是远东地区：伊朗和阿富汗，一直延伸到印度河流域。塞琉古王朝在此的统治并不稳固，但在亚历山大去世后的第一个世纪（公元前323年），其主要竞争对手是其他马其顿和希腊国王，他们并不反对希腊的传播。公元前260年，巴克特里亚的印度-希腊人，在狄奥多图斯的领导下，宣布独立。几乎在同一时期（或许正是由于这场叛乱），讲伊朗语的帕提亚人从里海东岸向南挺进伊朗高原。一个世纪后，公元前146年，帕提亚国王米特拉达塔一世完成了征服，将塞琉古王朝逐出伊朗其他地区，并顺便占领了美索不达米亚。十年后，巴克特里亚的印度-希腊国王被来自北方的斯基泰人（萨迦人）入侵所击败，不久之后，来自东北的贵霜人（又称吐火罗人或月氏人）也入侵了巴克特里亚。

The first area to go was over to the far east: Iran and Afghanistan, down to the Indus valley. Seleucid control here was not long secure, but for the first century after the death of Alexander (323 BC) the competition came mainly from other Macedonian and Greek kings, who would not dispute the spread of Greek. By 260 BC the Indo-Greeks in Bactria, first led by Diodotus, had declared themselves independent. At just about the same time (and possibly caused by this rebellion) the Iranian-speaking Parthians thrust south from the eastern shores of the Caspian into the plateau of Iran. A century later, in 146 BC, Mithradata I of Parthia completed the job, and drove the Seleucids out of the rest of Iran, taking Mesopotamia for good measure. Ten years later, as it happened, the Indo-Greek kings of Bactria were overwhelmed by a Scythian (Saka) invasion from the north, shortly followed by the Kushāna (also known as Tocharians or Yuezhi) from the north-east.

希腊语在这片广袤区域内的消亡并非一蹴而就。在东部，贵霜帝国（公元1世纪中叶至2世纪末）的官方语言巴克特里亚语，最终采用了希腊字母书写。这在伊朗语系中独一无二，表明贵霜人与希腊人之间存在着一段较长的文化交流时期。公元44年，即印度-希腊王朝覆灭190年后，据说智者阿波罗尼奥斯在一次穿越兴都库什山脉的旅行中，用希腊语与人交流毫无障碍，最终抵达塔克西拉。在那里，一位帕提亚国王用希腊语款待了他，并详细阐述了他接受的希腊式教育。 ²⁸我们从官方铭文中得知，在帕提亚帝国的西部地区，讲希腊语的社群延续了数代。在苏萨（曾是希腊的首都，名为“欧拉乌斯河畔的塞琉西亚”）发现了希腊铭文，其中一则可追溯至公元21年；在更西边的美索不达米亚，底格里斯河畔的塞琉西亚，有一则希腊语和帕提亚语双语铭文，其年代可追溯至公元151年，记录了帕提亚人战胜（据推测）讲希腊语的梅塞尼人的战役，地点位于波斯湾沿岸，靠近今天的巴士拉。（值得注意的是，铭文刻在赫拉克勒斯雕像的腰部，每条大腿上分别刻有不同的语言。²⁹）梅塞尼也是卡拉克斯的伊西多罗斯的故乡，这位希腊人在基督时代前后撰写了《帕提亚驿道》一书，描述了从西南到东北穿越帕提亚的路线。

Extinction of Greek over this vast area was not immediate. In the east, there is the fact that Bactrian, the official language of the Kushāna empire, which lasted from the middle of the first to the end of the second century AD, came to be written in Greek script. This is unique among Iranian languages, and it shows that the Kushāna had a longish period of cultural interaction with the Greeks. In AD 44, 190 years after the fall of the Indo-Greek kings, the sage Apollonius of Tyana is said to have had no difficulty communicating in Greek on a tour that took him all the way across the Hindu Kush to Taxila, where he was entertained (in Greek) by a Parthian king, who expatiated on his own Greek-style education.²⁸ We know from official inscriptions that in the western regions Greek-speaking communities continued for several generations within the Parthian empire. There are Greek inscriptions at Susa, which had been the Greek capital as ‘Seleuceia on the Eulaeus’, one of them from AD 21; and farther west in Mesopotamia, in Seleuceia on the Tigris, there is a bilingual inscription in Greek and Parthian explicitly dated as late as AD 151, recording a Parthian victory over a (presumably) Greek-speaking Mesene, on the Persian Gulf, near modern Basra. (It is tellingly inscribed on the loins of a statue of Hercules, one language on each thigh.²⁹) Mesene was also home to Isidorus of Charax, a Greek who around the time of Christ wrote a book, The Parthian Stations, describing the route across Parthia from south-west to north-east.

帕提亚人的语言政策旨在逆转历史。他们恢复了阿拉姆语作为帝国的通用语，留下了大量阿拉姆语铭文，并沿用阿拉姆语的书写系统来书写自己的语言（伊朗语）。这一事实表明，在塞琉古王朝统治的两个世纪里，希腊语从未完全取代阿拉姆语。

The Parthians’ own language policy was to reverse history. They reinstated Aramaic as the lingua franca of their empire, leaving numerous inscriptions in it, and also using its writing system for their own (Iranian) language. The fact that this was possible shows that Greek had never fully replaced it during the two centuries of Seleucid rule.

但帕提亚人并不急于抹去希腊统治伊朗的遗产。他们的钱币上都刻有希腊文铭文：

But the Parthians were not anxious to efface the heritage of Greek rule in Iran. Their coins all bear a legend in Greek:

巴西勒斯·巴西勒翁·阿尔萨库·尤尔盖图·迪凯欧·埃皮法努斯·菲莱诺斯

BASILEOS BASILEON ARSAKOU EUERGETOU DIKAIOU EPIPHANOUS PHILELLENOS

万王之王阿尔萨斯，仁慈的，公正的，杰出的，热爱希腊的。

Of the King of Kings, Arsaces, Beneficent, Just, Outstanding, Greek-loving.

普鲁塔克记载，公元前53年，帕提亚国王奥罗德斯收到罗马将军克拉苏战败的骇人证据——他的头颅被砍下时，他实际上正在观看欧里庇得斯的歌剧《酒神的女祭司们^》。

And Plutarch recounts the story that when in 53 BC the Parthian king Orodes received the gruesome evidence of the Roman general Crassus’s defeat, his severed head, he was actually attending a performance of Euripides’ Bacchae.^*

或许是因为希腊语仍然是邻近强权罗马帝国的官方语言，所以即使希腊语的使用实际上早已消亡，它在帕提亚的威望仍然延续了很久。帕提亚王国在伊朗延续了五个世纪。公元224年，最后一位帕提亚人将王位让给了阿尔达希尔，他是下一个王朝——萨珊王朝的第一位国王，讲波斯语。然而，当他的儿子沙普尔在纳克什鲁斯塔姆（Naqsh-i Rustam）的岩石上刻下自己的功绩时，他却用三种语言书写，纳克什鲁斯塔姆正对着波斯波利斯的波斯国王陵墓：波斯语、帕提亚语和希腊语。 ³⁰

Perhaps because Greek remained the language of the neighbouring superpower, the Roman empire, its prestige lasted in Parthia long after its use must have actually died out. The Parthian kingdom in Iran lasted for five centuries. In AD 224 the last Parthian yielded to Ardashir, the first king of the next dynasty, the Sassanids, who spoke Persian. And yet when his son Shapur came to have his own achievements inscribed on rock at Naqsh-i Rustam, facing the tombs of the Persian kings at Persepolis, he wrote them up in three languages: Persian, Parthian and Greek.³⁰

叙利亚、巴勒斯坦、埃及

Syria, Palestine, Egypt

伊朗从未成为罗马帝国的一部分，美索不达米亚也只是其中极小的一部分。因此，它们从未像叙利亚、巴勒斯坦和埃及那样，形成永久的希腊领土的概念。公元前332年，它们被并入亚历山大帝国，因此被称为“希腊化”；公元前64年，罗马将军庞培将叙利亚和巴勒斯坦纳入帝国版图，使其成为帝国直辖行省；公元前30年，奥古斯都废黜了托勒密王朝的最后一位君主克利奥帕特拉，将埃及纳入帝国版图。正如我们所见，这些罗马征服除了在军队和宫廷中引入一些拉丁语的使用外，并未对语言产生任何影响。但它们确实强化了一种观念，即世界这一地区，即地中海东南端，将永久地、尽可能稳定地置于西方的控制之下。希腊语在那里仍然被外国精英广泛使用，而在帕尔米拉、加沙和亚历山大等一些特殊城市，则有更多人使用希腊语。

Iran was never part of the Roman empire, and Mesopotamia only in very small part.† So they never acquired the sense of permanent Greek possessions that came to characterise Syria, Palestine and Egypt. They had been incorporated into the empire of Alexander, hence ‘Hellenised’, in 332 BC; in 64 BC the Roman general Pompey had incorporated Syria and Palestine as a directly governed province of the empire; and in 30 BC Augustus had added Egypt, deposing Cleopatra, last of the Ptolemies. These Roman conquests, as we have seen, had no linguistic effect, except to introduce some use of Latin in the army and the courts. But they did serve to underline the sense that this part of the world, the far south-east of the Mediterranean, was to be permanently, and as far as possible stably, under western control. Greek remained widely spoken there by foreign elites, and in some special cities such as Palmyra, Gaza and Alexandria by many more.

埃格里亚大约在公元400年访问了耶路撒冷，他的记载让我们对该地区国际朝圣中心的语言状况有了大致的了解：

A sense of the language situation in a centre of international pilgrimage in the region is given by Egeria, who visited Jerusalem around AD 400:

鉴于该国一部分人精通希腊语和叙利亚语，一部分人只会希腊语，还有一部分人只会叙利亚语，而且主教虽然懂叙利亚语，却总是用希腊语而非叙利亚语讲话，因此主教身边总会有一位神父，在主教用希腊语讲话时，将他的讲话翻译成叙利亚语，以便所有人都能听懂。同样，教堂里诵读的经文也必须用希腊语诵读，因此总会有人将其翻译成叙利亚语，以便信众能够从中得到教导。至于在场的拉丁语使用者，即那些既不懂叙利亚语也不懂希腊语的人，也为他们提供了翻译，以免他们不悦；因为有一些精通希腊语和拉丁语的弟兄姐妹，会用拉丁语进行讲解^。31

Seeing that in that country part of the people know both Greek and Syriac, another part only Greek and yet another part only Syriac, given also that the bishop, although he knows Syriac, always speaks in Greek and never in Syriac, there is always by his side a priest who, while the bishop is speaking in Greek, translates his comments into Syriac so that everyone may understand them. Similarly for the lessons that are read in church: since these must be read in Greek, there is always somebody there to translate them into Syriac for the benefit of the people, that they may receive instruction. As for the Latins who are there, i.e. those who know neither Syriac nor Greek, to them also is an interpretation given lest they be displeased; for there are some brethren and sisters, proficient in both Greek and Latin, who give explanations in Latin.³¹

我们已在第三章“阿拉伯语——雄辩与平等：‘臣服’的胜利”（第93页）中探讨过，新近皈依伊斯兰教的人们发动的一系列闪电战扭转了局势，并由此形成了延续至今的语言格局。从穆罕默德于公元632年去世到如今，短短十年间，希腊人对这片土地长达950年的统治和希腊语的使用被彻底终结，阿拉伯语在这片土地上开启了长达1300年的统治。这对所有相关人员来说都是一个巨大的冲击，尤其是在希拉克略皇帝重新加强帝国防御几年之后。希拉克略皇帝仅用了四年时间就击退了萨珊王朝对这些领土的入侵，而自本世纪初以来，希腊人一直无法染指这些领土。

We have already considered (see Chapter 3, ‘Arabic — eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission”, p. 93) the series of lightning campaigns by the newly declared Muslims which reversed this state of affairs, and so created the linguistic situation that has lasted to the present day. A single decade from the death of Muhammad in 632 sufficed to draw a thin, but indelible, line under 950 years of Greek control and Greek language, and to turn the page, opening what is so far 1300 years of Arabic sway in these same lands. A shock for all concerned, but particularly so since it came a couple of years after the emperor Heraclius had reasserted the imperial defences, and in four years of campaigning rolled back a Sassanid invasion of these same territories which had denied them to the Greeks since the beginning of the century.

这对帝国在政治和经济上都是毁灭性的打击：损失的地区包括埃及，尽管埃及在650年后仍然是帝国首都的主要粮食供应地。据最佳估计^*，阿拉伯人的征服使帝国损失了一半以上的人口。但情况本可能更糟。阿拉伯人多次试图攻占君士坦丁堡，但均以失败告终；尽管在接下来的两个世纪里几乎每年都劫掠安纳托利亚，他们也未能将其割让出去。 ³²希拉克略对该地区进行了重组，有效地将文职和军事管理相结合，并实施了戒严令。敌人兵临城下的清晰认知促成了这种新的纪律，并使帝国保持了有效的防御动员状态。

This was a devastating blow to the empire politically and economically: the losses included Egypt, still after 650 years the major supplier of grain to the empire’s capital. And the best estimates^* suggest that the Arab conquests deprived the empire of over half its population. But it could have been worse. The Arabs failed in repeated attempts to take Constantinople itself, and also failed to detach Anatolia, despite raiding it virtually every year for the next two centuries.³² The region had been reorganised by Heraclius, effectively combining civil and military administration, and imposing martial law. The clear perception that the enemy was at the gate imposed this new discipline, and kept the empire effectively mobilised for defence.

拜占庭帝国在七世纪中叶的衰落呈现出一种有趣的模式。那些得以保全的地区，恰恰是希腊语为主要语言、被广大民众而非精英阶层所使用的地方。这影响了罗马帝国的语言自我认知（因为他们仍然认为自己是罗马人）。拉丁语的使用率早已下降，甚至失去了其在法律领域的最后堡垒：自一个世纪前的查士丁尼时代以来，大多数法律都是用希腊语起草的；而皇帝的副手，禁卫军长官，如今往往不懂拉丁语。帝国仍然控制着意大利南部的大片领土，并将其中部分地区维持了四百年之久，直到十一世纪中叶。但此时，希腊语而非拉丁语，首次被视为整个社会的统一语言。令现代人感到困惑的是，他们将希腊语称为“ rōmaíika ”（罗马语），以区别于“latiniká”（拉丁语）。但回顾十世纪中叶，皇帝君士坦丁七世·波菲罗根尼图斯指出，正是在希拉克略时期，罗马人“希腊化并抛弃了他们祖先的语言——罗马语”。 ³³

There is an interesting pattern to the Byzantine losses in the mid-seventh century. The places that held firm were precisely those where Greek was the majority language, spoken by the people at large and not just elites. This had an effect on the linguistic self-image of the Roman empire (for they still considered themselves Roman). Latin had been dropping out of use for some time, losing even its last redoubt in the law: since the time of Justinian, a century before, most legislation had been drafted in Greek; and the emperor’s second-in-command, the praetorian prefect, was now often a man who knew no Latin. The empire still held much of southern Italy, and would hang on to parts of it for another four hundred years, until the middle of the eleventh century. But now for the first time Greek, not Latin, was seen as the unifying language of the whole community. Confusingly for moderns, they called Greek rōmaíika, ‘Romanish’, contrasting it with latiniká. But looking back from the mid-tenth century, the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus remarked that it had been in the time of Heraclius that the Romans ‘had been Hellenized and discarded the language of their fathers, the Roman tongue’.³³

希腊

Greece

尽管帝国疆界令人不安的扩张并未停止，但希腊语地区的衰落实际上已经停止，并持续了四百年之久。当时人们可能并未意识到这一点，因为在黎凡特东南部的土地逐渐丧失的同时，北部地区也陷入了动荡之中。

Although the unsettling bellows motion of the imperial frontiers did not stop, the attrition of Greek-language areas effectively now did, for the next four hundred years. This would not have been clear at the time, for while the southeastern lands of the Levant were being lost, the north too was in turmoil.

希腊语能否在其核心地区存续，一度岌岌可危。公元378年，说日耳曼语的哥特人入侵；441年至447年，说突厥语的匈奴人入侵；479年至482年，说日耳曼语的东哥特人入侵；493年，说突厥语的保加尔人入侵。战乱持续到六世纪。危机爆发五十年后，拜占庭历史学家普罗科皮乌斯记载道：

It was touch and go whether Greek would survive in its own heartland. After invasions from Germanic-speaking Goths in 378, Turkic-speaking Huns in 441-7, Germanic Ostrogoths in 479-82, and Turkic-speaking Bulgars in 493, the mayhem continued in the sixth century. Fifty years after the crisis, the Byzantine historian Procopius recounted:

自查士丁尼成为罗马皇帝以来，伊利里亚和整个色雷斯地区，即从爱奥尼亚湾（亚得里亚海）到拜占庭城郊的整个区域，包括希腊和赫尔松半岛，几乎每年都遭到匈奴人、斯拉夫人和安泰人的入侵，给当地居民造成了难以估量的损失。我相信，每次入侵都有超过二十万罗马人被杀或被俘…… ³⁴

Illyricum and all of Thrace, i.e. the whole country from the Ionian Gulf [the Adriatic] to the outskirts of Byzantium, including Greece and the Chersonese, was overrun almost every year by Huns, Slavs and Antae, from the time when Justinian became Roman emperor, and they wrought untold damage among the inhabitants of those parts. For I believe that in each invasion more than two hundred thousand Romans were killed or captured…³⁴

然后，在公元前581年，正如以弗所的约翰所记载：“一群被称为斯拉夫人的可憎之人，占领了整个希腊、帖撒罗尼迦地区和整个色雷斯，攻占了城市，夺取了众多堡垒，蹂躏焚烧，使当地人民沦为奴隶，并自立为整个国家的主人，凭借武力定居于此，如同这片土地是他们自己的一样。” ³⁵

Then, in 581, as John of Ephesus records: ‘an accursed people, called Slavonians, overran the whole of Greece, and the country of the Thessalonians, and all Thrace, and captured the cities, and took numerous forts, and devastated and burnt, and reduced the people to slavery, and made themselves masters of the whole country, and settled in it by main force, and dwelt in it as though it had been their own’.³⁵

这并非暂时现象，而是导致了希腊人的大规模移民。根据《莫奈姆瓦夏编年史》记载，到公元587/8年，希腊几乎没有哪个地区能够幸免于斯拉夫人的蹂躏，这次的入侵者是阿瓦尔人（另一个突厥民族）：“只有伯罗奔尼撒半岛东部，从科林斯到马利亚斯角，由于地势崎岖、交通不便，才未受斯拉夫人的侵扰。”

This was not a temporary phenomenon, and it led to large-scale emigration by Greeks. According to the Chronicle of Monemvasia, by the year 587/8 scarcely any part of Greece was immune to the Slavic scourge, this time from the Avars (another Turkic group): ‘Only the eastern part of the Peloponnese, from Corinth to Cape Maleas, was untouched by the Slavonians because of the rough and inaccessible nature of the country.’

人们或许会预期这会导致斯拉夫语的永久传播，正如它在更北部的塞尔维亚和保加利亚所发生的那样（参见第七章“巴尔干半岛的斯拉夫曙光”，第309页）。但不知何故，希腊语使用者在南部地区又重新占据了斯拉夫语使用者的优势地位。在七、八、九世纪，帝国组织了一系列重新安置计划和传教活动，将斯拉夫人迁往安纳托利亚北部，并将其他人迁往希腊南部。据记载，公元805年，尼基弗鲁斯一世“重建了拉凯代蒙城，并在那里安置了来自不同地方和城镇的混杂人口，包括卡菲尔人、色雷斯人、亚美尼亚人和其他族群，并将其设立为主教区”。 ³⁶

This might have been expected to lead to a permanent spread of Slavic languages, as indeed it did in Serbia and Bulgaria farther north (see Chapter 7, ‘Slavonic dawn in the Balkans’, p. 309). But somehow the preponderance of Greek over Slavic speakers was restored in the south. In the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries the empire organised a series of resettlement programmes and missionary campaigns, moving Slavs into northern Anatolia, and bringing others into southern Greece. We hear that in 805 Nicephorus I ‘built de novo the town of Lacedaemon and settled in it a mixed population, namely Kafirs, Thracēsians, Armenians and others, gathered from different places and towns, and made it into a bishopric’.³⁶

同样，在公元860年代，巴西尔一世致力于使北方的塞尔维亚人皈依基督教：“他使他们希腊化[graik$oTbar;sas]，按照罗马的习俗将他们置于总督的统治之下，为他们施行洗礼，并将他们从自己统治者的压迫中解救出来。” ³⁷

Likewise, in the 860s, Basil I was hard at work to convert the Serbs in the north: ‘having greeked them [graik$oTbar;sas], he subjected them to governors according to Roman custom, honoured them with baptism, and delivered them from the oppression of their own rulers’.³⁷

如果目的是解释为什么一些社群既信奉基督教又说希腊语，那么具体细节很难厘清；可以肯定的是，他们学习的宗教仪式肯定是用希腊语进行的。后来，服兵役也使许多斯拉夫人进入了希腊语世界。但最终的结果很明确：希腊语在其传统发源地仍然保持着主导地位，或者说重新确立了其主导地位。

The details are impossible to clarify, if the aim is to explain why some communities became Greek-speaking, as well as Christian; certainly the religious liturgies they learnt would have been in Greek. Later, service in the army would also have served to bring many Slavs into the Greek-speaking world. But the net effect is clear. Greek remained, or was re-established as, the dominant language of its traditional homeland.

安纳托利亚

Anatolia

希腊在安纳托利亚的统治一直持续到1071年：那一年，希腊帝国在曼齐克特战役（今马拉兹吉尔特，凡湖以北）中败给了当时主宰穆斯林世界的新兴势力——塞尔柱突厥苏丹国。^*即便如此，希腊帝国本可以避免失去其核心领土：塞尔柱苏丹阿尔普·阿尔斯兰当时正忙于其他战争，他曾试图以建立两国联盟的条件，扶持战败的罗马努斯·狄奥根尼复辟，并使突厥人得以通过叙利亚北部的埃德萨、希拉波利斯和安条克进入地中海。但罗曼努斯及其提出的条件遭到了拒绝：结果是塞尔柱人迅速推进到安纳托利亚的大部分地区，从此这片领土由说土耳其语的人统治，并且——令人好奇地让人想起旧帝国在意大利的起源——被称为鲁姆苏丹国。

Greek dominance in Anatolia lasted until 1071: in that year the empire lost the battle of Manzikert (modern Malazgirt, north of Lake Van) to a new power dominating the Muslim world, the sultanate of the Seljuk Turks.^* Even so, it could still have avoided the loss of its whole heartland that resulted: the Seljuk sultan, Alp Arslan, with other wars to fight, had attempted to reinstate the defeated emperor, Romanus Diogenes, on terms that would have established an alliance between the two powers, and given the Turks access to the Mediterranean through Edessa, Hierapolis and Antioch in northern Syria. But Romanus, and the proffered terms, were rejected: the consequence was the Seljuks’ swift advance through most of Anatolia, a territory that was thenceforth to be dominated by speakers of Turkish, and known—in curious reminiscence of the old empire’s origins in Italy—as the Sultanate of Rum.

短短一百年间，土耳其大批移民迅速涌入，并很快转变为土耳其定居者，这使得希腊语社群失去了其主要聚居地的核心地带。因此，全球希腊语人口注定会迅速下降，无论是由于移民潮，还是由于后代学习者的流失。一些希腊语社群将集体迁徙；许多人将离开家园，前往他乡寻求更好的发展机会；而一些希腊家庭的孩子，在新环境中逐渐融入，最终会说土耳其语。

This spread of Turkish hordes, who rapidly converted into Turkish settlers, within a hundred years had deprived the Greek language community of the heart of its major territory. The population of Greek speakers worldwide was therefore set to fall rapidly, whether by emigration, or simple loss of later generations of learners. Some whole communities of Greek speakers would depart en masse; many individuals would leave their homes to find better opportunities elsewhere; and the children of some Greek families, assimilating to the new environment, would grow up speaking Turkish.

这对希腊语作为主要语言的生存造成了直接打击。五代人之后，希腊语又遭受了一次政治重创，使其残存的威望荡然无存。1204年，由西欧骑士组成的第四次十字军东征偏离了其进攻巴勒斯坦穆斯林政权的既定任务，攻占了君士坦丁堡以及希腊部分地区和安纳托利亚沿海地区。随后，在威尼斯人的策划下，他们建立了一个“拉丁帝国”，并以此巩固了其占领的领土。这个帝国徒劳地苟延残喘了几个世纪，最终被土耳其人吞并。第四次十字军东征将东罗马帝国削弱为五个独立的小国：尽管其中一个小国在1261年成功夺回君士坦丁堡，并重建了一个残存的帝国，但此后没有任何一个希腊国家能够对日益强大的土耳其人构成真正的威胁。 1453 年，希腊帝国最终被土耳其人消灭；1471 年，最后一个希腊小国特拉比松也被消灭。土耳其人用了 380 多年时间从曼齐克特一路推进到君士坦丁堡——而希腊随后也在土耳其统治下度过了同样的时间，他们称之为“土耳其统治”（Tourkokratía）。

This was a direct blow to the survival of Greek as a major language. Five generations later, it suffered a political blow that shattered its remaining prestige. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade, made up of knights from western Europe, turned aside from its appointed mission of attacking the Muslim powers that held Palestine, and captured Constantinople, as well as parts of Greece and the coast of Anatolia. It then proceeded to hold its gains as a ‘Latin Empire’, masterminded by the Venetians, which lingered on pointlessly for a couple of centuries before being absorbed by the Turks. The Fourth Crusade had reduced the East Roman Empire to a set of five separate statelets: although one of these did manage to retake Constantinople in 1261, and reconstitute itself as a rump of empire, no Greek state was ever again more than a minor constraint on the growing power of the Turks. The empire was finally extinguished by the Turks in 1453, and the last Greek statelet, Trebizond, in 1471. It had taken the Turks just over 380 years to advance from Manzikert to Constantinople—the same interval of time that Greece was subsequently to spend under Tourkokratía, as they called the domination of the Turks.

希腊语曾是普世帝国的语言，这个帝国野心勃勃，几乎不计较其语言究竟是希腊语还是罗马语。如今，它却成了被征服民族——东正教徒的语言。东正教徒只是奥斯曼土耳其帝国众多“米勒特勒”（实际上是宗教团体）之一。最终，希腊人屈服了，他们开始意识到自己所说的语言是什么：它与他们的东正教信仰密不可分，并在他们失去自由的漫长岁月里，成为他们身份认同的重要象征。

From being the language of a universal empire, so catholic in its aspirations that it scarcely noticed whether its language was Hellenic or Roman, Greek had now become the tongue of a conquered people, the Orthodox Christians, just one of the milletler (’nations’—really, religious groupings) that had a place in the cosmopolitan empire of the Ottoman Turks. Humbled at last, the Greeks now did notice what language they were speaking: it was inseparable from their Orthodox faith, and became an important token of their identity for the long centuries in which they lacked their freedom.

鉴于公元前一千纪末期，安纳托利亚的希腊语使用程度并不亚于巴尔干半岛（即我们现在认为的希腊自然疆界最远端），那么，希腊语社群最终集中于两千五百年前其扩散的源头——同一地点，几乎算得上是一个巧合。回溯历史，我们可以看出，这仅仅反映了这样一个事实：来自东方的穆斯林势力，尤其是阿拉伯人和突厥人，比来自北方的哥特人、阿瓦尔人和斯拉夫人等威胁组织得更加严密，也更具长期凝聚力。斯拉夫人可以被同化，而突厥人则不能。

Given that Anatolia had been, in the late first millennium BC, no less Greek-speaking than the Balkan peninsula that culminates in the Peloponnese, the place that we now think of as the farthest natural extent of Greece, it is almost an accident that the Greek-speaking community ended up concentrated in the same place from which it spread two and a half thousand years before. Looking back, we can see that this only reflects the fact that the Muslim powers that threatened from the east, the Arabs and above all the Turks, were better organised, and more coherent in the long term, than the threats that came from the north, the Goths, Avars and Slavs. Slavs could be assimilated; Turks could not.

年龄的慰藉

Consolations in age

ksipnó ke vlépō efθís áno na méni

i í$rTcross;ia Aθiná me parrisían

ky étsi apo psilá mú sindiχéni:

'Tis Elá$rTcross;stin brín din ev$rTcross;ksían

χrónostinás poté $rTcross;en din maréni ,

yat' amárandos íne i sofía。

ksipnó ke vlépō efθís áno na méni

i í$rTcross;ia Aθiná me parrisían

ky étsi apo psilá mú sindiχéni:

’Tis Elá$rTcross;s tin brín din ev$rTcross;ksían

χrónos tinás poté $rTcross;en din maréni,

yat’ amárandos íne i sofía.’

我醒来，立刻看见

雅典娜女神正高高在上地等候着我，她从高处对我说：“古希腊的荣耀，时间永远不会抹去：因为智慧是不朽的。”

I awake and see at once above me

The same Athena is waiting candidly, And with these words from on high she talks to me: ’The renown of Greece of old No time will ever efface: For wisdom is imperishable.’

安德烈亚斯·米亚雷斯（约1708年）

Andreas Myiares (c.1708)

希腊语的时代已经过去：它不再是拥有普世抱负的社群的语言。当文艺复兴席卷西欧时，希腊语作为学术智慧的源泉确实得以复兴。阅读希腊语的能力，以及对希腊古典著作（一如既往地集中在公元前五世纪和四世纪——尽管现在更加关注亚里士多德）的熟悉，成为学者们辨别真伪的重要标准，但它始终未能成为学者间的通用语：这一地位由它的老朋友拉丁语占据。

Greek had been undone: it was no more the language of a community with universal aspirations. When the Renaissance took hold in western Europe, it did enjoy a resuscitation as a source of scholarly wisdom. Ability to read the language, and a familiarity with its classics (focused on the fifth and fourth centuries BC, as ever—though with more attention now to Aristotle), became a useful touchstone of authenticity for scholars, but it never rose to the level of a lingua franca among them: that position was held by its old colleague, Latin.

但希腊语作为一种鲜活的语言，如今却属于许多小社群所有，它们既无权也无力积极影响其他社群。而它们彼此之间的团结感，也因与传统希腊文学教育的联系断裂而减弱。这种断裂始于十三世纪，比土耳其人的胜利早一个半世纪，当时拉丁列强首次控制了帝国的众多旧领地。

But Greek itself, as a living language, was now the property of a number of small communities, with no right or power actively to influence others. And their sense of unity one with another was diminished by the breakdown of any link with traditional Greek literary education, a development that had begun in the thirteenth century, a century and a half before the Turkish triumph, when the Latin powers had first taken control of so many of the empire’s old domains.

在这些本土社群中，土耳其语并未消亡。它在东正教礼拜仪式中的作用为其传播提供了庇护；事实上，即使作为被征服民族的语言，它也未受到任何威胁。基督徒没有被迫皈依伊斯兰教。尽管塞尔柱人的扩张促进了11至12世纪土耳其语移民在安纳托利亚的扩散，但始于13世纪末的奥斯曼土耳其人的政治扩张主要服务于军事目的，将当地土耳其人重组为强大的军事力量。虽然奥斯曼帝国随后席卷了近东和中东，但历史上它从未倾向于推广任何语言。相反，它似乎完全放任自流——事实上，除了军事征服之外，它从未系统地组织过任何活动——并给予其组成米利特勒充分的^自治权。

In these home communities, it did not die out. Its transmission was shielded by its role in Orthodox liturgy: but in fact, even as the language of a subject people, it was under no threat. There was no pressure for Christians to convert to Islam. Although the Seljuk advance had favoured the spread of Turkish-speaking settlers across Anatolia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the political advance of the Ottoman Turks, begun in the late thirteenth century, served mainly a military purpose, reorganising resident Turks into devastating campaigners. Although the Ottoman empire then took the Near and Middle East by storm, historically it had no tendency to favour the spread of any language whatever. Rather it seemed totally laid back—indeed, never systematically organised for any purpose beyond military conquest—and allowed ample self-governance to its constituent milletler.^*

然而，希腊语实际上在此时已不再是世界语言。尽管西欧对希腊语传统抱有浓厚的兴趣，但既然希腊语不再是其自身的主导者，希腊语社群便无法再将自身视为独立自主的世界中心。希腊人开始将自己视为弱小的民族，只能通过与远比自己强大的其他民族进行谈判来行动。他们的唯我论就此终结。我们在此不再赘述其历史，尽管其中有很多值得讲述的内容。语言社群的新重心首次转移到了乡村，他们不再需要维护古老的历史或希腊语在世界上的地位，这促成了民间歌谣和浪漫故事的创作，这些歌谣和浪漫故事不再受早期古典主义束缚。一种新的希腊语意识油然而生，它根植于“克莱夫提斯”（kléftis）的精神，即不接受外来压迫的亡命之徒的精神。但当西方列强在 1821 年响应浪漫主义运动的号召，保证希腊从奥斯曼帝国的统治下解放出来时，人们再次讨论了应该为希腊语设定怎样的真正标准——希腊精英阶层再次做出了有利于有意识地推行古风政策的判断。

Nevertheless, Greek effectively ceases to be a world language at this point. For all the gratifying interest in its tradition out in the west of Europe, now that it was no longer master in its own house the Greek-speaking community could no longer see itself as the autonomous centre of its own world. The Greeks began to think of themselves as a small people, able to act only through negotiation with others far stronger than them. Their solipsism was at an end. We shall not trace its history further, although there is much to tell. The new centre of gravity in the language community, for the first time a rural one, with no duty to maintain an ancient past or a wider sense of Greek’s place in the world, led to the composition of popular lays and romances, untrammelled by earlier classical hang-ups. There was a new sense of Greek, based on the spirit of the kléftis, the outlaw who accepted no foreign oppression. But when the western powers, in sympathy with the Romantic movement, guaranteed Greece’s liberation from the Ottomans in 1821, there was renewed discussion as to what true standard to set for the Greek language—and once again the Greek elite gave its judgement in favour of a policy of conscious archaism.

然而，两千多年来，这项政策首次未能奏效。或许是因为图尔科统治时期城市统治地位的瓦解，以及由此导致的古典教育的衰落，一些事情发生了改变。一种通俗的——希腊语称之为“世俗体”——书面语风格确立了自身地位，并开始确立其作用。十九世纪和二十世纪见证了更多斗争：但自1967年至1974年军政府垮台以及1976年《教育法》颁布以来，一种基于接近日常口语希腊语的新书面语标准已被广泛接受。

Yet now, for the first time in over two thousand years, the policy would not stick. Something had changed, perhaps because of the break in urban dominance, and hence classical education, during the Tourkokratía. A popular—in Greek, ‘Demotic’—style of written language had established itself, and its role could now be asserted. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed further struggles: but since the fall of the colonels’ regime (1967-74) and the Education Act of 1976, there is now acceptance of a new written standard based on something close to ordinary spoken Greek.

回顾：一部经典作品的生命周期

Retrospect: The life cycle of a classic

Aièn aristeúein kaì hupeírokhon émmenai allón

Aièn aristeúein kaì hupeírokhon émmenai allōn

mēdè génos patérōn aiskhúnemen, hoì még' áristoi…

mēdè génos patérōn aiskhúnemen, hoì még’ áristoi…

永远要做最好的，永远要胜过别人。

Always to be the best, and to be superior to others,

并非要羞辱那些最优秀的父亲们……

And not to shame the race of fathers who much the best…

荷马，《伊利亚特》，第六卷，第208行（一位父亲临别时对荷马史诗英雄的忠告）

Homer, Iliad, vi.208 (a father’s parting advice to a Homeric hero)

这项对希腊语社群三千年来兴衰的考察，反而凸显了一个根本性问题的紧迫性：究竟是什么让希腊语使用者在与腓尼基人、埃及人、波斯人、伊特鲁里亚人、高卢人、迦太基人或其他同时代的民族相比时，如此推崇自己？究竟是什么让他们认为自己的族群和生活方式比其他所有民族都更加文明，并且在很大程度上说服了这些形形色色的“蛮族”接受希腊人的观点？更重要的是，考虑到古代世界的权力格局，为什么罗马人会成为亲希腊人，而不是伊特鲁里亚人、迦太基人甚至埃及人的拥护者？

This survey of the expansion and contraction of the Greek language community over three millennia only makes more urgent a fundamental question. What was it about Greek speakers which had commended them over their contemporaries, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Persians, Etruscans, Gauls, Carthaginians or whatever? What was it about them that made them think their group, and their way of life, more civilised than all these others, and furthermore by and large persuaded these miscellaneous ‘barbarians’ to take the Greek view of the matter? Most importantly, given the flow of power relations through the ancient world, why did the Romans become philhellenes, rather than admirers of Etruscan, Punic or indeed Egyptian ways?

西欧喜欢自诩为希腊的间接继承者；然而，无数现代关于希腊人的记述从未提出过这个问题，更遑论给出答案。相反，它们只是追溯了希腊人在神话、政治、文学、艺术、建筑、哲学和科学等领域为西方文明做出诸多开创性贡献的过程。答案的一部分其实已经隐含其中：因为除了罗马人之外，没有哪个同时代的人能像希腊人那样留下如此浩瀚的文化遗产。罗马人选择在希腊人的基础上发展，而不是取而代之。识字能力或许可以被视为希腊人的秘密武器。

Western Europe likes to think itself an indirect heir of the Greeks; but the countless modern accounts of what the Greeks were like never ask, much less answer, this question. Rather, they simply trace the processes by which the Greeks produced so many pioneering contributions to Western civilisation, in mythology, politics, literature, the arts, architecture, philosophy and science. Part of the answer is thus given implicitly: for none of their contemporaries has laid by as vast a record of their cultural product as the Greeks—unless one counts the Romans, who chose to build on the Greek work, rather than replace it. Literacy could be seen as the Greeks’ secret weapon.

但这并非全部答案。毕竟，识字能力是腓尼基人赠予他们的礼物，而腓尼基人本身也只是中东地区众多识字文明的巡回推销员，其足迹遍布从埃及到巴比伦和埃兰的广大地区。但与腓尼基人不同的是，希腊人选择利用识字能力来记录他们的文化：阅读希腊语的能力带来了大量的原创作品。因此，希腊人得以接触到“文明的艺术”，这种接触方式足以令其他民族印象深刻。毕竟，文明与橄榄油和葡萄酒等美好事物相结合，自然会令人心驰神往。

But this can’t be the whole answer. After all, literacy was a gift to them from the Phoenicians, who themselves were just the lately travelling sales representatives of a vast Middle Eastern range of literate societies, from Egypt at one end to Babylon and Elam at the other. But unlike the Phoenicians, the Greeks had chosen to use their literacy to record their culture: the ability to read Greek brought a vast range of original works in its wake. The result was that the Greeks had access to ‘the arts of civilisation’ in a way that could only impress others when they came into contact with them. Civilisation, after all, when combined with such delights as olive oil and wine, is apt to be attractive.

这个问题还可以追溯到更早的阶段：为什么居住在地中海尽头爱琴海沿岸的希腊人能够以这种方式发展和传播文明艺术？对此，任何答案都带有极大的推测性：但值得注意的是，希腊人是地中海周边唯一一个拥有足够规模形成城市的语言群体，尽管他们识字，却没有聚集成更大的国家，最终也没有统一成帝国的倾向。这或许是因为他们居住在山峦叠嶂、岛屿星罗棋布的环境中，使得小型社群比大型社群更容易供养和防御：但这确实意味着希腊成为了一个巨大的文化发展竞争舞台——如果某种发展成功或具有吸引力，就能传播到其他希腊人（例如阿提卡文学），但这种发展不会相互排斥。从这个意义上讲，希腊早期历史可以被视为与文艺复兴后的欧洲历史相媲美——竞争性独立与良好沟通的结合取得了丰硕成果。

The question can be thrown one stage farther back: why was it that the Greeks, living on the lands that adjoined the Aegean Sea at the end of the Mediterranean, were able to develop and propagate arts of civilisation in this way? Any answer to this one becomes extremely speculative: but it is notable that the Greeks were the only language community around the Mediterranean where the groupings were large enough to form cities, but which, though literate, had no tendency to be agglomerated into larger states, and hence ultimately to be united into an empire. This may have been a result of the mountainous and island-studded environment in which they lived, making small communities easier to feed and defend than large ones: but it did mean that Greece became a vast competitive playground for cultural developments—developments that could spread to other Greeks if successful or attractive (as, for example, was Attic literature), but which would not tend to crowd each other out. In this sense, the early history of Greece can be seen as comparable to that of Europe after the Renaissance—a fertile marriage of competitive independence and good communications.

人们常常带着些许浪漫色彩地声称，希腊对后世文明的最大贡献在于发明了民主制度，这是实现“自由”（ eleuthería ）的最高机制，而自由一直是希腊人所珍视的美德。这种说法显然是错误的：它既无法解释希腊语吸引外来者的真正原因，也无法解释希腊语为何能够传播到其故土东西两侧如此广阔的地区。前文已经指出，大多数希腊城邦从未实行过民主制度；而那些在亚历山大征服埃及和亚洲大部分地区建立的、以希腊语为官方语言的大型城邦，无一例外都是君主制国家。它们是官僚国家，公民的自治既不可能，也并非理想。而且，它们的规模也远超以往任何城邦。当希腊语传播开来时，它并没有保留那些可能在其文化最初形成过程中起关键作用的特质。

It is often, somewhat romantically, claimed that Greece’s greatest contribution to subsequent civilisation was the invention of democracy, the highest mechanism invented to realise eleuthería, ‘freedom’, always a virtue that the Greeks claimed to care for. This is certainly false: false as a theory of what appealed in Greek to outsiders confronted by it, and false as an account of what made Greek capable of spreading so far to the east and west of its homeland. It has already been pointed out that most Greek city-states were never democratic; and the larger states with Greek as their official language, established all over Egypt and much of Asia after conquests by Alexander, were without exception monarchies. They were bureaucratic states, where civic control by concerned citizens was not possible, nor even an ideal. They were also much bigger than any city-states had ever been. When the Greek language spread, it did not carry with it the properties that had possibly been crucial in the original creation of its attendant culture.

事实上，自公元前三世纪以来，希腊文化的一大特点便是对古典作品的传承，他们尽可能地模仿古典作品的语言形式、风格和内容，却从未真正领略到公元前五、四世纪古典作品创作过程中那种创新和独创的激情。无论希腊语言传统中哪些元素得以延续——暂且不论其古典作品是否真的是有史以来最伟大的著作——其根源更多地在于僵化的保守主义，而非对激动人心的新思想的开放态度。即便如此，希腊语言社群的历史也表明，如果某种吸引人的事物被保存下来，保守主义本身也具有吸引力。

Indeed, a major property of Greek culture, throughout its long continuous history since the third century BC, has been a wish to hark back to the classics, aping their linguistic form as well (as far as possible) as their style and content, but never the excitement of innovation and originality that must have attended their actual writing in the fifth and fourth centuries. Whatever has proved enduring in the Greek language tradition—and leaving aside the question of whether its classics really are the best things ever written—it has far more to do with rigid conservatism than openness to exciting new ideas. If nothing else, the history of the Greek language community shows that conservatism too can be attractive, if something attractive is being conserved.

我们可以看出，在古代世界，希腊文化的吸引力不容小觑。即使是那些致力于限制和削弱希腊影响力的人，也仍然尽可能地从中汲取养分：阿富汗的贵霜王朝推翻希腊国王后，仍然在自己的钱币上使用希腊语；帕提亚和亚美尼亚的朝臣们一边欣赏希腊悲剧，一边指挥军队击败希腊罗马学生；迦太基的将领们用希腊语与自己的雇佣军沟通。毫无疑问，希腊人是地中海世界伟大的沟通者。

We can see that what Greek had to offer was highly attractive in the context of the ancient world. Even those whose careers were dedicated to limiting and diminishing Greek influence nevertheless took as much as they could from it: the Kushāna kings of Afghanistan, who went on using Greek on their coinage after unseating Greek kings; the Parthian and Armenian courtiers entertaining themselves with Greek tragedies, even as their armies were besting the Greeks’ Roman students; the Carthaginian generals who used Greek to communicate with their own forces of mercenaries. The Greeks were undoubtedly the Great Communicators of the Mediterranean world.

但将这种无疑极具吸引力的商品传播到整个世界（oikouménē）的代理人，实际上很少是希腊人。希腊语的传播，更像是搭便车传播的典范。马其顿并非希腊语社群的领地；然而，它的国王却在远至印度边境的地方建立了讲希腊语的殖民地。阿拉姆语是希腊最大的敌人——波斯帝国的语言；然而，波斯帝国两百年来一直将其作为官方语言使用，这意味着希腊人可以借鉴一个清晰的模式，在其新征服的领土周围建立以希腊语为基础的交流网络。两百年后，罗马及其拉丁语席卷了整个地中海沿岸；然而，希腊语，这种意大利南部殖民地的语言，却被接纳为与拉丁语平起平坐的语言，并最终成为罗马帝国真正的文化基石——帝国中任何一个受过教育的人都离不开它。两百年后，席卷帝国的又一股新浪潮是神秘宗教，尤其是基督教；尽管这些宗教都不是起源于希腊，但它们的首选语言却是希腊语，因此希腊语与罗马帝国晚期最伟大的运动——基督教会——建立了密不可分的联系。幸运的是，正是这场运动，如今已发展成为基督教东正教，在罗马帝国东部瓦解后，成为希腊语得以在长达四个世纪的土耳其统治下得以保存的关键。因此，希腊语的辉煌发展，要归功于其盟友在过去两千三百年的每一个关键转折点上的鼎力相助。

But the agents who spread this undoubtedly attractive commodity round the oikouménē, the inhabited world, were seldom actually Greek. The spread of the Greek language is, rather, an object lesson in the effectiveness of hitching a ride. Macedon was beyond the pale of the Greek language community; yet its king planted Greek-speaking colonies all the way to the boundaries of India. Aramaic was the language of Greece’s greatest foe, the Persian empire; yet the two-hundred-year-old use of it as a chancery language across the empire meant that there was a clear model for Greeks to follow in seeding a Greek-based communications network round their newly won domains. Two hundred years later Rome, and with it Latin, was taking the whole Mediterranean rim by storm; yet Greek, the language of colonies in southern Italy, was accepted into a kind of equality with Latin, and went on to become the true cultural milieu of the Roman empire—in the sense that no cultivated inhabitant of the empire could be without it. Two hundred years later still, the new brooms sweeping the empire were mystery religions, especially Christianity; yet although none of them originated in Greece, their language of preference was Greek, and so Greek built an indissoluble link with the greatest movement of the late Roman empire, the Christian Church. By a final stroke of good fortune, this same movement, now specialised as Christian Orthodoxy, turned out to be the key to preserving Greek through four centuries of Turkish domination, after the dissolution of the Roman empire in the east. Greek thus owes its remarkable career to help from its friends, at every crucial turning point of the last 2300 years.

然而，令人好奇的是，尽管希腊语与其他文化强权（军事、行政和精神领域）关系密切，但它却极难受到其他语言的影响。我们已经看到，在遥远的东方，希腊语乐于从印度借用词汇来指代一些有趣的新物质；^*但其近亲语言阿拉姆语的影响却微乎其微。在西方，希腊语与拉丁语作为罗马帝国的主要语言共存了五个世纪，这导致了大量用于指代官方和军事事务、行政和财政的借词（例如，月份名称、货币名称、等级、军衔、税收），但几乎没有日常用语。^许多人们可能会认为是借词的词，例如consul（执政官）、senātus（元老院）、Augustus（奥古斯都）、imperātor（皇帝），实际上通常都是翻译过来的：húpatos（字面意思是“最高的”）、gerousía （老人们的聚会）、 Sebastós（尊敬的）、autokrátōr（自我控制者）。同样，基督教和其他神秘宗教对希腊语的采用，如果忽略人名、地名以及诸如amébar;n和hōsanná 之类的感叹词，也出人意料地保留了希腊语的原貌。 †

Yet curiously, for all its close relationship with other cultural powers (military, administrative and spiritual), Greek has been highly resistant to influence from others with which it has been in contact. We have already seen that out in the farthest eastern reaches Greek was prepared to take on loan words for interesting new substances from India;^* but the influence of its bedfellow language Aramaic was negligible. In the west, its five centuries of cohabitation with Latin as a principal language of the Roman empire led to a crop of borrowings to designate official and military matters, administration and finance (for example, names of months, coins, ranks, military ranks, taxes) but hardly any day-to-day words.^* Many words where one might have expected borrowings, such as consul, senātus, Augustus, imperātor, are in fact usually translated: húpatos (literally ‘topmost’), gerousía (’gathering of old men’), Sebastós (’reverend’), autokrátōr (’self-controller’). Likewise, the Christian and other mystery religions’ adoption of Greek left it surprisingly untouched, if one discounts the names of people and places, and interjections such as amébar;n and hōsanná.†

第四次十字军东征使希腊人失去权力后，情况发生了变化。拉丁语元素进入希腊语并保留了下来：bánio，“洗澡”，bastar$rTcross;o，“私生子”，bíra，“啤酒”。此后，在土耳其主导的世界中，希腊语更像是一种被殖民的语言，吸收了大量的土耳其语词汇，不仅用于指代诸如tzamí（清真寺）、χatzís（麦加朝圣者）、o$rTcross;alíski（妾侍，源自土耳其语oda-lik ，意为“房客”，与希腊语指小词组合而成）等新概念，也用于指代诸如boyatzís（画家）、tembélis（懒惰的）、yakás（衣领）、bólikos（丰富的）和sokáki （街道）等看似无关紧要的日常事物。许多此类词汇在希腊独立后要么消失，要么被语言规划政策所压制。但自帝国崩溃以来，人们对借词的容忍度有所提高，这本身就证明了我们当时对希腊自我形象变化的看法是正确的：希腊语不再承担维护其历史领土秩序的责任，也不再作为基督教东正教的堡垒，因此不再刻意与邻国保持隔离。

Things changed after the Greeks were disempowered by the Fourth Crusade. Latin elements came into the language and stuck: bánio, ‘bath’, bastar$rTcross;o, ‘bastard’, bíra, ‘beer’. After this, within a Turkish-run world, Greek did behave more like a colonised language, and absorbed a whole host of Turkish words, not just for new concepts such as tzamí, ‘mosque’, χatzís, ‘Mecca pilgrim’, o$rTcross;alíski, ‘concubine’ (from Turkish oda-lik, ‘roomer’, combined with a Greek diminutive), but for such mundane and apparently gratuitous things as boyatzís, ‘painter’, tembélis, ‘lazy’, yakás, ‘collar’, bólikos, ‘abundant’ and sokáki, ‘street’. A lot of such vocabulary has since dropped out, or been suppressed by language planning policies since independence. But the new tolerance of borrowed words since the collapse of the empire is evidence in itself that we were right to see Greek’s self-image as changing around that time: relieved of responsibilities to keep order in its historic dominions, and indeed to stand as the bulwark of Christian Orthodoxy, the language was no longer maintained in such conscious isolation from its neighbours.

希腊作为一个文化区域，凭借共同的语言、共同的神祇和普遍的亲缘感而独立发展，并因此获得了全球影响力：这是它给马其顿和罗马帝国留下深刻印象的回报。几个世纪以来，这些帝国逐渐衰落，留下了规模庞大的政治实体，而希腊语使用者则成为了这套并非由他们缔造的政治体系的实际守护者。他们采取的应对方式是坚守自身传统的内核，而这些传统最终并非政治性的，甚至也不是思想性的，而是语言性的。当面对比城邦更大的政治实体时，他们独特的公民治理方式逐渐瓦解；他们的理性主义或多神论哲学让位于基督教；但他们从未放弃对吕西亚斯或德摩斯梯尼的修辞、埃斯库罗斯或欧里庇得斯的诗歌以及柏拉图和色诺芬的散文的信仰。面对一个多民族、多语言的帝国，这是一种奇特的信仰。但它确实奏效了。

Having developed autonomously as a cultural area, linked primarily by a common language, a common set of gods and a general sense of kinship, Greek effectively had global reach pressed upon it: this was its reward for impressing so mightily the imperial powers of Macedon and Rome. Over the centuries, those powers ebbed away, leaving large-scale political units in their wake, and Greek speakers as the de facto guardians of a political dispensation not of their making. They reacted by holding to the core of their own traditions, which in the last analysis turned out not to be political, or even intellectual, but linguistic. Their distinctive, civic, approach to government fell away when confronted with units larger than city-states; their rationalist, or polytheistic, philosophies yielded to Christianity; but they never lost faith in the rhetoric of Lysias or Demosthenes, the poetry of Aeschylus or Euripides, or the prose of Plato and Xenophon. It was a curious faith, confronted with a multinational, multilinguistic empire. But it served.

随着希腊帝国的衰落，希腊的唯我论实际上也随之终结。经过两千年的坚定统一，希腊不再需要固守“卓越标准（即便并非精神上的卓越）是公元前五、四世纪某个希腊城邦的语言”这一不变准则来维护自身的统一性。从我们二十一世纪的视角来看，尤其是在像英语这样已经摆脱了对古典作品（无论是本语言还是其他语言）崇拜的语言社群中，我们很难看到这一核心神话的真正价值。但希腊的成就仍然是一个有趣的丰碑，它展现了一种自觉地保持语言传统（即使是影响深远的传统）统一性的方法。时至今日，希腊语中几乎没有出现严重的语言分裂，这一点仍然令人瞩目。拉丁语之后衍生出多种不同的民族语言传统，这些语言都已从公元前二世纪左右罗马拉丁语的共同根源中发展而来。然而，希腊语——即使是在黑海沿岸的土耳其地区，或是意大利南部偏远村庄使用的希腊语——也始终明确其共同中心所在。对阿提卡语的推崇确实奏效，它确保了希腊语始终是单一社群的通用语言。

Greek’s solipsism in effect came to an end with the downfall of its associated empire. After two millennia of steadfast concentration, it was no longer constrained to preserve its unity by holding the line that the unchanging standard of excellence, linguistic if not spiritual, was the language of one Greek city in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. From our perspective in the twenty-first century, and especially in a language community, such as English, which has cut itself free from adoration of classics, whether in its own language or anyone else’s, it is hard to see real value in this central myth. But the Greek achievement stands as an interesting monument of one way to keep a language tradition, even one of vast extent, self-consciously united. The absence of serious division in the Greek language is quite striking to this day. While Latin is succeeded by a handful of separate national language traditions, all of which have moved on from their common roots in the Latin of Rome in, say, the second century BC, Greek—even as spoken on the Turkish shores of the Black Sea, and in villages in the remote south of Italy—knows what is its common centre. The adulation of Attic did actually work, in the grand programme of making sure that Greek remained the language of a single community.

^{*这是荷马史诗《}伊利亚特》 （ii.684）中阿喀琉斯族人的名字，由于他是希腊最伟大的史诗中最伟大的希腊英雄，因此，通过联想，这可能足以给整个种族命名。

^* It was the name for some of Achilles’ people in Homer’s Iliad (ii.684), and since he was the greatest Greek hero in that greatest of Greek poems, this may have been sufficient to name the whole race by association.

^†在某些希腊字母中写作f的 w ，在大多数方言中已从发音（以及拼写）中消失。因此，严格来说，荷马史诗中这个词的 w 只是推测性的。lōTnes是同一个词，只是 a+o 缩略成了 ô。后来，印度人也称希腊人为 yavana——尽管他们第一次重大遭遇是与一支由马其顿人领导的好战军队。§ 根据斯特拉波的《历史丛书》9.2.10，奥罗普斯附近，奥罗普斯位于面向埃雷特里亚的海岸。¶希腊的另外两个族名，似乎更古老，是达那俄伊人和阿卡伊俄伊人。这是他们的民族诗人荷马在公元前一千纪早期使用的词汇。达那俄伊这个名字与阿尔戈斯城有关，阿尔戈斯是荷马代表希腊时期的一座主要城市。达那俄斯是这座城市的传说中的国王。阿卡伊奥伊（Akhaioi）一词，当特指伯罗奔尼撒半岛北部某个地区的人民（他们并无特别的代表地位），或者指弗提奥提斯（Phthiotis）的人民，后者在荷马史诗《伊利亚特》第二卷第684行中也作为阿喀琉斯王国的一部分而为人所知。其拉丁语形式Achîvî表明，其词干末端原本带有一个W（因此实际上是“Akhaiwoi”）。但在这个A和I颠倒的词形中，即阿希亚瓦（Ahhiyawa ），它似乎在其他文献中被用作一个主要王国的称谓，例如公元前两千年统治安纳托利亚的赫梯人的王室信函（用楔形文字刻在泥板上）。由此看来，希腊人在早期可能还以另一个名字为人所知。

^† w, written as f in some Greek alphabets, dropped out of pronunciation (and hence spelling) in most dialects. Hence the w in this Homeric word is, strictly speaking, conjectural, lōTnes is the same word, with a common contraction of a+o into ô. Later the Indians came to call the Greeks yavana too—although their first major encounter was with a warlike force led by Macedonians. § Near Oropus, which is on the coast facing Eretria, according to Strabo, ix.2.10. ¶ Two other ethnonyms for Greek, seemingly much older, are Danaoi and Akhaioi. They are the words used by their ethnic poet Homer, writing some time in the early first millennium BC. The name Danaoi has associations with the city of Argos, a major city at the time when Homer represents Greece. Danaos is a legendary king of that city. Akhaioi, when it is used specifically, refers either to the people of an area in the north of the Peloponnese, with no particular claim to representative status, or to the people of Phthiotis, which is also notable in Homer as another part of the kingdom of Achilles (Iliad, ii.684). Its Latin form, Achîvî, shows that it originally had a W at the end of the stem (hence really ’Akhaiwoi’). But in this form, with an inversion of the A and I, as Ahhiyawa, it does seem to figure as a term for a major kingdom in other documents, namely the royal correspondence (in cuneiform on baked clay tablets) of the Hittites who dominated Anatolia in the second millennium BC. So it seems that, early on, the Greeks were known abroad by yet another name.

这两个词可能都被埃及人使用过。公元前1370年左右的一段铭文（位于阿蒙霍特普三世陵庙的一尊雕像基座上）提到了TNY，以及其他一些在克里特岛可以找到的名称。埃及象形文字通常会省略元音，而希腊语中元音之间的i或y也经常丢失，因此这可能是对达奈俄伊人的明确指代。在另一段公元前1186年左右的铭文中，DNYN被提及为攻击埃及的海上民族之一。但在更早的一段公元前1218年左右的铭文中， IKWS（很可能就是阿卡伊沃伊人或阿希亚瓦人）被提及为抵抗海上民族的盟友（Strange 1980; Muhly et al. 1982）。

Both these terms may have been used by the Egyptians. There is an inscription c. 1370 BC (on a statue base in a funerary temple of Amenophis III) which mentions the TNY along with a variety of other names locatable in Crete. Egyptian hieroglyphics usually omit vowels, and i or y between vowels is often lost in Greek, so this could be an explicit reference to the Danaioi. In another inscription c. 1186 BC, the DNYN are mentioned as one of the Sea-Peoples attacking Egypt. But in an earlier inscription c. 1218 BC, the IKWS, which could just possibly be the Akhaiwoi or Ahhiyawa, are mentioned as allies in the resistance against the Sea-Peoples (Strange 1980; Muhly et al. 1982).

^*本章中，文中出现的希腊人名均采用传统的拉丁化形式：因此不是Hēródotos, Akhaiós，而是Herodotus, Achaeus。在罗马化转写中，h 的发音与英语中的 h 基本相同，但常用于送气：kh、ph、th 更准确的写法应该是 k ^h p ^h t ^h，实际上就像英语中的“Can Pete take it?”一样。除了双元音au、eu之外，希腊语中的u在阿提卡地区的发音与今天的法语中的 u 非常相似，音标为 [y]；ou 的发音为长 ū，与英语rune 中的 ū 相同。公元初期之前的希腊语重音符号反映了声调模式，而非重读；此后，它们仅用于标记重读音节。

^* In this chapter, Greek names in the text are given in the conventional Latinised form: hence not Hēródotos, Akhaiós but Herodotus, Achaeus. In the romanised transcription, h has much the same force as in English, but is often used to aspirate a consonant: kh, ph, th could more accurately have been written k^h p^h t^h in fact as in English ‘Can Pete take it?’ Except in diphthongs, au, eu, the Greek u was pronounced in Attic much as it is today in French, phonetically [y]; ou was a long ū, as in English rune. The accents in Greek up to the early centuries AD give some image of the pattern of tone, not stress; thereafter they just mark the stressed syllable.

^{事实上，阿提卡}的这种卓越地位源于文化和商业而非军事上的优势。正如我们所见，雅典很早就是一个重要的贸易中心。但直到公元前五世纪，希腊文学都是多种不同方言的混合产物。

^* As it happens, this pre-eminence of Attic was the result of cultural and commercial, not military, dominance. Athens, as we have seen, was early a major trading centre. But until the fifth century Greek literature had been the joint product of many different dialects.

^*比较一下现代英语口语的词汇量：大多数名词有两种形式（word，words），大多数动词有四种形式（talk，talks，talked，talking）。

^* Compare the figures for modern spoken English: two forms for most nouns (word, words), four for most verbs (talk, talks, talked, talking).

^当时希腊方言林立，这对这些文学风格和体裁产生了有趣的影响：在书面文学诞生后的最初几个世纪里，每一种风格和体裁都与特定的方言联系在一起，通常是其最初使用者的方言，尽管这些文学作品在很大程度上是共享的。因此，史诗必须用荷马混合的爱奥尼亚方言和埃奥利亚方言写成，抒情诗用多利安方言，历史最初用爱奥尼亚方言，悲剧用阿提卡方言。这在一定程度上促进了方言知识的传承，即使在希腊世界日益统一，方言逐渐退出日常对话之后也是如此。这尤其能说明，语言的风味很大程度上是通过联想而形成的。

^* The fact that Greek speech was so dialectally riven at the time had an interesting impact on these styles and genres: for the first few centuries after written literature began, each became associated with a particular dialect, typically that of its first practitioners, even though the literature was largely shared. So epic poetry had to be written in Homer’s mixture of Ionic and Aeolic, lyric poetry in Doric, history at first in Ionic, tragedy in Attic. This played some role in perpetuating knowledge of the dialects, even after the increasing unity of the Greek world was pushing them out of actual use in conversation. It is a particularly good example of how so much of a language’s flavour comes purely by association.

^*它在安纳托利亚黑海沿岸还有一个殖民地，即阿米苏斯（今萨姆松）。

^* It also had one colony on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, Amisūs, modern Samsun.

† 虽然亚得里亚海并未受到迦太基或腓尼基的影响，但它并未受到希腊殖民者的过多关注，也没有与任何特定的都城联系起来。然而，事实上，它曾是多利安人的领地。这里有三座主要城市：埃皮达姆诺斯（Epidamnos），后改名为迪拉奇乌姆（Dyrrhachium，今阿尔巴尼亚的杜拉泽），由科林斯及其邻近的科西拉岛于公元前625年左右建立；阿特里亚（Atria），位于波河三角洲，由埃伊纳人于公元前6世纪末建立（这座多利安城市后来被雅典人清除并重新定居）；以及安科纳（Ancona），这座由皮切尼人建立的城市，后于公元前387年由来自叙拉古的希腊难民重建。（威尼斯泻湖的潜力在古代并未得到开发。）

† Although not prohibited by Carthaginian or Phoenician influence, the Adriatic received rather little attention from Greek colonists, and was not identified with a particular metropolis. However, it was de facto a Dorian area. Three major cities here were Epidamnos, later Dyrrhachium (now Durrazzë in Albania), founded by Corinth and the neighbouring island of Corcyra c.625 BC; Atria, in the Po delta, founded in late sixth century BC by Aegina (a Dorian city later cleared and repopulated by Athens); and Ancona, a city of the indigenous Piceni later refounded by Greek refugees from Syracuse in 387 BC. (The promise of the Venetian lagoon was not exploited in antiquity.)

尽管这个名字（Buzántion）听起来庄严雄伟，但它只是Búzas的指小词，仿佛Hongkers已经成为香港的正式名称。

§ For all its stately sound, this name (Buzántion) is just the diminutive of Búzas, as if Hongkers had become the official name of Hong Kong.

昔兰尼城建于公元前630年左右，专门种植和出口一种名为“西尔菲翁”（sílphion）的药用植物。但希腊语的传播范围更广，远至更东边的非洲海岸，那里兴起了一种截然不同的商业模式。瑙克拉提斯（Naucratis，意为“海之女王”）是尼罗河三角洲的一个泛希腊贸易中心，也是与埃及市场进行贸易的枢纽，其贸易特许权由法老授予。这一模式的开创者是来自爱奥尼亚的希腊人，他们来自米利都和萨摩斯，这两个城市地理位置优越，就在瑙克拉提斯以北。（参见第四章。）

¶ Cyrene, founded c.630, specialised in the growth and export of sílphion, a medicinal plant. But Greek was also to be heard farther east on the African shore, where a rather different kind of enterprise was established. Naucratis, ‘Sea-Queen’, was a pan-Hellenic emporium in the Nile delta, a centre for trade with the Egyptian market, in a trading concession allowed by the pharaoh. The initiative here had come from Ionian Greeks, from Miletus and Samos, conveniently sited just to the north. (See Chapter 4.)

^早期希腊文学与中世纪和近代欧洲文学的体裁截然不同。它没有小说、散文或奇幻文学，也没有任何专门描写宗教虔诚的文学作品。事实上，小说、散文和奇幻文学都是希腊人发明的，但出现的时间要晚得多，大约在公元最初几个世纪。当时希腊是罗马帝国的附属国，人们对公共事业和公共责任并没有太大的期望。富裕阶层可以自由地追求更私人的生活，创作浪漫故事和个人冒险经历的描写。同样，在早期希腊，对个人宗教体验的探索与希腊精神格格不入，尽管在基督教传播之后，这类探索逐渐成为核心。早期希腊的宗教表达形式主要是赞美奥林匹斯诸神的颂歌，侧重于讲述他们的神话故事。

^* This early Greek range is very different from the genres of medieval and modern European literature. There is no novel, no essay, no fantasy literature. Neither is there any literature devoted to religious devotion. As it happens, the first three of these were all Greek inventions too, but from a much later period, in the first centuries AD, when Greece was an enforced part of the Roman empire, and there was no serious expectation of a public career or public responsibilities. Affluent individuals were then free to explore more personal concerns, to write romances, and descriptions of personal adventures. Likewise, explorations of individual religious experience were alien to the Greek spirit in these earlier days, although they were later to become central after the spread of Christianity. The religious outpourings of the earlier period take the form of hymns to the Olympian gods, with an emphasis on recounting their myths.

^†公元前一世纪初，色雷斯人狄奥尼修斯在当时的希腊学术中心亚历山大出版了斯多葛学派和亚历山大学派著作汇编《语法学》，希腊语法分析基本上已经完成。

^† Greek analysis of grammar was essentially complete when Dionysius the Thracian, working in Alexandria, the intellectual centre of Greece at the time, published his compilation of Stoic and Alexandrian work as Tékhnē Grammalik$ēA at the beginning of the first century BC.

^*西西里岛是个例外，它打破了土著居民在希腊人定居后得以幸存的普遍规律，希腊人在那里的势力必定尤为强大。他们至少在那里建立了十三个独立的殖民地，而岛屿的西端则被另一个外来势力迦太基占据，并拥有另外三个殖民地。尽管如此，在最初为新城选址时，原有的西坎人、埃利米人和西塞尔人也发挥了至关重要的作用。

^* An exception to this tendency for indigenous populations to survive Greek settlement was Sicily, where the Greek presence must have been particularly dense. They had at least thirteen separate colonies there, and the western end of the island was in the hands of another foreign incomer, Carthage, with three more. Nevertheless, the pre-existing Sicans, Elymians and Sicels had been very much a factor when land was originally sought for the new cities.

† 他们所获得的这种政治声望与暴君式的狂妄自大实验有关，特别是叙拉古的狄奥尼修斯（公元前 430-367 年）和阿克拉加斯的阿加托克勒斯（公元前 361-284 年）的实验，他们都组织了希腊对迦太基的战争，但最终却没有任何净效果。

† Such political fame as they acquired was associated with experiments in tyrannous megalomania, notably those of Dionysius of Syracuse (430-367 BC) and Agathocles of Acragas (361-284 BC), both of whom organised Greek wars against Carthage with zero net effect.

§ ekbebarbarōsthai：罗马征服希腊并开始尝试同化其文化已经两百年了；然而一个希腊人——而且还是一个在罗马受过教育的人——仍然把罗马人归类为蛮族。

§ ekbebarbarōsthai: it had been two hundred years since Rome had conquered Greece, and begun its attempt to assimilate its culture; yet a Greek—and one educated at Rome at that—still classed Romans as barbarians.

^*对于雅典来说，这是意义非凡的一年，是其在伯罗奔尼撒战争中被斯巴达彻底击败后恢复民主的第一年。

^* This was a significant year for Athens, the first year of restored democracy after its conclusive defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.

† 雅典采用了米利都使用的爱奥尼亚字母，而不是他们自己的“阿提卡”风格，因为阿提卡风格没有区分长 E (H—eta) 和长 O (Ω—omega) 与其短版本。

† Athens adopted the Ionic alphabet as used in Miletus, in preference to their own ‘Attic’ style, which had not distinguished long E (H—eta) and long O (Ω—omega) from their short versions.

§ Q ( qoppa ) 最初是后元音 [k]，用于后元音 [o] 和 [u] 之前。早期铭文使用 FH 来表示 [f]，因为 F 最初是 [w] 或 [v] 的符号。大多数爱奥尼亚方言（包括米利都和雅典的方言）都失去了这个音，因此它从希腊官方字母表中消失了。但这里有一个奇特的转折。建立皮特库塞和库迈的卡尔基斯和埃雷特里亚实际上讲爱奥尼亚方言，因此人们可能会认为他们在书写中也会省略 F。

§ Q (qoppa) was originally a back [k] used before back vowels [o] and [u]. Early inscriptions use FH to represent [f], since F was originally a sign for [w] or [v]. Most of the Ionic dialects (including those at Miletus and Athens) had lost this sound, hence its disappearance from the offical Greek alphabet. But there is a bizarre twist here. Chalcis and Eretria, which founded Pithecusae and Cumae, actually spoke Ionic dialects, and so might have been expected to drop F in writing too.

¶ 原则上，东地中海的这种独特产品有可能被另一个伟大的殖民文明腓尼基人带到了西方，但后来成为（并且一直保持至今）葡萄酒酿造业首屈一指的国家恰好位于希腊的影响范围之内，即意大利和高卢/法国，而不是北非和西班牙。

¶ In principle, it is possible that this distinctive product of the eastern Mediterranean was brought to the west by the other great colonial civilisation, the Phoenicians, but the countries that became (and have remained to this day) pre-eminent in wine-making happen to be in the Greek sphere of influence, Italy and Gaul/France, rather than North Africa and Spain.

^*这一事件（以及其他希腊和印度的证据）被公元二世纪的梵语语法学家帕坦伽利（Patañjali）在《梵书》3.2.111 中以两个例句记录下来：arunad yavanan sāketam，“希腊人围攻了萨克塔”（Saketa，位于加格拉河畔，靠近法扎巴德的城市）；arunad yavanan mādhyamikam，“希腊人围攻了马迪亚米卡”（Madhyamika，位于拉贾斯坦沙漠以南，靠近奇托尔加尔的城市）。在这两个例子中，句子都必须符合事实，才能说明这个时态（过去未完成时）用于描述“说话者未亲眼目睹但可能发生的近期公开事件”。由于这两个城市中只有萨克塔位于从旁遮普到巴特那的路上，因此希腊人似乎也曾向更南更西的拉贾斯坦邦发动战役。

^* This event is immortalised (along with other evidence, Greek and Indian) in two example sentences of the second-century Sanskrit grammarian Patañjali (3.2.111): arunad yavanan sāketam, ‘The Greek has besieged Saketa’ (a city close to Faizabad on the Gaghra); arunad yavanan mādhyamikam, “The Greek has besieged Madhyamika’ (a city close to Chittaurgarh, south of the Rajasthan desert). In each case, the sentence needs to be veridical in order to illustrate the point, that this tense (LaN, the imperfect) is used ‘of a recent public occurrence not actually witnessed by the speaker but potentially so’. Since of these two only Saketa is actually on the way to Patna from the Panjab, it appears that the Greeks also campaigned farther south and west, in Rajasthan.

^*它也是浪漫男孩名字罗密欧的由来。

^* It is also the origin of the romantic boy’s name Romeo.

公元四世纪，居住在叙利亚安条克的希腊人利巴尼乌斯撰写了六十四篇演说，内容涵盖市政、教育和文化事务，此外他还写了一部自传和一篇赞美安条克的颂词。他只提到过一次阿拉姆语的存在，尽管这种语言在周边地区广泛使用（Mango 1980：第1章）^。

^* Libanius, a Greek resident of Antioch in Syria in the fourth century AD, wrote sixty-four speeches which range over municipal, educational and cultural matters, as well as an autobiography and an encomium of the city. He mentions the existence of Aramaic just once, although it was spoken in the country all around (Mango 1980: ch. 1).

从现代视角来看，乃至从古典印度视角来看，都很有趣——古典印度视角旨在区分婆罗门/学者、刹帝利/武士国王和吠舍/商人这三种阶层的互补角色^——希腊人和罗马人似乎从未考虑过商业领袖是谁这个问题。虽然财富的确在积累，但这更多地被视为一种享乐而非荣耀的途径。

^* It is interesting from a modern standpoint—and indeed from a classical Indian one, concerned to distinguish the complementary roles of Brahman/scholar, Kshatriya/warrior-king and Vaiśya/trader—that the question of who the leaders in business were never seems to have occurred to the Greeks or Romans. Fortunes were certainly being made, but this was seen as an occasion more for indulgence than glory.

† 罗马人在法律和军事领域从未使用过希腊语。即使在希腊语的核心地带——东地中海地区，情况也是如此，而拉丁语在那里几乎没有传播。

† Two fields where the Romans never used Greek were law and the military. This was true even in Greek’s heartland in the eastern Mediterranean, where Latin otherwise made little headway.

^*这并非仅有的泛希腊运动会：另外两项分别是德尔斐的皮提亚运动会和科林斯组织的伊斯米亚运动会。

^* These were not the only pan-Hellenic games: two others were the Pythian games in Delphi, and the Isthmian games, organised by Corinth.

^†已知早期希腊人对自身语言持较为客观态度的唯一例子出现在埃及：公元前591年，一位希腊雇佣兵在阿布辛贝神庙一座雕像的腿上刻下了一段涂鸦。他将同行的希腊人称为“alloglōssous ”，意为“说另一种语言的”，即与埃及人不同的语言。希罗多德也曾用这个词来指代在埃及的希腊人（2.154）。这与斯特拉波（vi.1.2）更为典型的态度形成鲜明对比，斯特拉波认为在意大利的罗马人与当地的希腊人相比，仍然是蛮族。

^† The only known case where early Greeks took a less ethnocentric view of their language was in Egypt: there is a graffito from 591 BC, written by a Greek mercenary on the leg of a statue at Abu Simbel. He refers to the Greeks among his party as alloglōssous, ‘of another language’, i.e. than the Egyptians. And Herodotus too uses this term of Greeks in Egypt (2.154). Contrast the more typical attitude of Strabo (vi.1.2), viewing Romans in Italy as still barbarians by contrast with the Greeks there.

^*他一定会痛恨这种讽刺：人们通常用他名字的拉丁化希腊语版本来称呼他。他是犹大之锤，y ūdāh maqqābā。

^* He would have hated the irony that he is generally known by this Latinised Greek version of his name. He was Judah the Hammer, yūdāh maqqābā.

† 来自帕提亚、米底、埃兰、美索不达米亚、犹太、卡帕多西亚、本都、小亚细亚、弗里吉亚、旁非利亚、埃及和昔兰尼附近的利比亚的访客，以及罗马人、外国犹太人、克里特人和阿拉伯人，都得到了明确的区分（使徒行传 2.9-10）。

† Visitors from Parthia, Media, Elam, Mesopotamia, Judaea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia Minor, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, and Libya around Cyrene, together with Romans, foreign Jews, Cretans and Arabs, are explicitly distinguished (Acts ii.9-10).

§ 他被称为Philádelphos，意为“爱他妹妹的人”：事实上，他娶了她，这是希腊人对埃及法老传统的一种惊人的采纳。

§ Known as Philádelphos, ‘Lover of His Sister’: indeed he married her, in an amazing Greek adoption of Egyptian pharaonic tradition.

^事实上，这些作家寥寥无几，但他们仍然是西欧传统古典教育的核心人物。剧作家埃斯库罗斯、索福克勒斯、欧里庇得斯和阿里斯托芬；历史学家修昔底德；哲学家柏拉图；以及少数演说家，其中以德摩斯梯尼最为杰出，他曾慷慨激昂地抨击马其顿国王腓力二世的威胁。这些可追溯至罗马帝国时期的希腊传统观念，实际上仍然主导着我上世纪60年代在英国学校接受的教育课程。

^* The authors are in fact extremely few, and are still recognisable as the core of a traditional, classical education in western Europe. The dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes; the historian Thucydides; the philosopher Plato; and a handful of orators culminating in Demosthenes, who inveighed against the threat of Philip of Macedon. Greek traditional attitudes dating back to the Roman empire effectively still defined the British school syllabus that I studied in the 1960s.

^{除了风格之外，}这些著作的另一个特点是创新性的。基督徒在推广一种新的书籍装帧形式——“手抄本”（codex）方面发挥了重要作用。这种手抄本由两张独立的双面书页装订在书脊上，取代了传统的卷轴。这种装帧形式至少在接下来的两千年里都占据了主导地位。据推测，这种装帧形式使得人们在标记和引用重要段落时，能够更方便地查阅书籍（Harris 1989: 296）。

^* Another feature of the writings besides their style was innovative. Christians were important in popularising the new format for books, the ‘codex’, with separate two-sided pages attached to a spine, as against the traditional scroll. This set the format for at least the next two thousand years. The conjecture is that this made books much easier to access when bookmarking, and quoting, important passages (Harris 1989: 296).

† 希腊语homilía和拉丁语sermō最初都指非正式的谈话、聊天。

† Both Greek homilía and Latin sermō originally meant an informal conversation, a chat.

^*他的主人，亚美尼亚国王阿尔塔瓦兹德斯，显然也是一位希腊学者，甚至用希腊语创作了自己的戏剧（普鲁塔克，克拉苏，完）。

^* His host, Artavazdes, the king of Armenia, was also a Greek scholar, apparently, to the extent of having written his own plays in the language (Plutarch, Crassus, fin.).

† 公元114年至117年间，整个地区被图拉真皇帝占领，后又被其夺回。但西北部的奥斯罗埃内地区在公元164年的一次罗马战役后被纳入罗马版图，并持续了两个世纪。

† Over the three years AD 114-17, the whole area was taken and lost again by the emperor Trajan. But the north-western portion, Osroëne, was incorporated for two centuries after a Roman campaign in 164.

^* Mango（1980：第一章）指出，公元六世纪中叶东地中海各省的人口为3000万，其中埃及800万，叙利亚-巴勒斯坦-美索不达米亚900万，安纳托利亚1000万，巴尔干半岛300万至400万。另需注意的是，安纳托利亚的人口是希腊和欧洲各省人口的两倍。

^* Mango (1980: ch. 1) puts the population of the eastern Mediterranean provinces in the mid-sixth century at 30 million, with 8 million in Egypt, 9 million in Syria-Palestine-Mesopotamia, 10 million in Anatolia and 3-4 million in the Balkans. Note also how Anatolia had twice the population of Greece and the European provinces.

^* 1071 年，拜占庭帝国的末日已经来临：诺曼人攻占巴里的消息传来，结束了他们在意大利长达 535 年的统治。

^* The writing was on the wall for the Byzantines in that year of 1071: news also arrived that the Normans had taken Bari, ending 535 years of their empire in Italy.

^*希腊东正教宗主教区确实从土耳其的征服中获益，因为苏丹穆罕默德二世在攻占君士坦丁堡后对其东正教臣民进行了统摄，将保加利亚和塞尔维亚宗主教区并入君士坦丁堡的管辖之下。当然，在语言上，它们仍然保持独立。

^* The Greek Orthodox patriarchate indeed gained from the Turkish conquest, since the Sultan Mehmet rationalised his Orthodox subjects after taking Constantinople, incorporating the Bulgarian and Serbian patriarchates under the authority of Constantinople. Linguistically, of course, they remained separate.

^*例如gingiberi、“姜”、sakkharon、“糖”（参见第 5 章“梵文的特征”，第 192 页）。

^* e.g. zingiberi, ‘ginger’, sakkharon, ‘sugar’ (see Chapter 5, “The character of Sanskrit’, p. 192).

^*接近完整列表的词汇似乎包括：spíti，“房子”（源自拉丁语hospitium，“客栈”），skamnío，“长凳” （scamnum），pórta，“门”，kámara，“房间”，vérga，“棍子”，以及可能还有áspros，“白色”（源自拉丁语asper，“粗糙的”）。相比之下，威尔士语的借词列表要长得多（威尔士语与拉丁语密切接触的时间长达一半）。（参见第七章“Consilium：罗马帝国的理论基础”，第303页。）

^* Close to the full list seems to be spíti, ‘house’ (from Latin hospitium, ‘inn’), skamnío, ‘bench’ (scamnum), pórta, ‘door’, kámara, ‘room’, vérga, ‘rod’, and possibly áspros, ‘white’ (from Latin asper, ‘rough’). Compare the vastly longer list of borrowings by Welsh (which was in close contact with Latin for half the time). (See Chapter 7, ‘Consilium: The rationale of Roman imperium’, p. 303.)

† 有人认为，基督教中表示“爱”的常用词agápē受到希伯来语'āhēb '（爱）的影响（该词恰好比希腊语带有更强烈的性暗示），而希腊语skébar;nē（帐篷）又受到希伯来语 &s car;eken（住所）的影响（Moule 1959: 186）。

† It has been suggested that the favourite choice of the Christian word for ‘love’, agápē, is influenced by Hebrew ’āhēb, ‘love’ (which happens to have much stronger sexual overtones than the Greek), and Greek skébar;nē, ‘tent’, by Hebrew &scar;eken, ‘dwelling’ (Moule 1959: 186).

7.

欧洲的争夺：凯尔特人、罗马人、日耳曼人和斯拉夫人

7

Contesting Europe: Celt, Roman, German and Slav

高卢人的谈话简洁而神秘，常常使用暗示性的谜语。

[The Gauls are] in their conversation terse and enigmatic, often speaking in allusive riddles.

西库鲁斯·伊奥多鲁斯，第31卷

iodorus Siculus, v.31

Trí húaithaid ata ferr sochaidi: úathad dagbríathar, úathad bó hi feór, úathad carat im churm。

Trí húaithaid ata ferr sochaidi: úathad dagbríathar, úathad bó hi feór, úathad carat im chuirm.

有三种稀缺比充足更好：缺少美好的言辞，缺少草地上的牛，缺少一起喝啤酒的朋友。

Three scarcities that are better than plenty: a scarcity of fine words, a scarcity of cows in a meadow, a scarcity of friends at beer.

《爱尔兰三联体》，库诺·迈耶编，93

The Triads of Ireland, ed. Kuno Meyer, 93

这也不适合罗马人的政府……因为他们比任何人都更憎恨绝对权力的本质和名称（“暴政”）。

nor was it fitting for the government of the Romans…given that they were possessed more than anyone by a hatred of the very nature and name of absolute power (’tyranny’).

阿里安，《亚历山大远征记》，第七卷，第15章第6节

Arrian, Alexander’s Campaign, vii.15.6

特设 vero regnum est，et ferri nullo pacto potest。

hoc vero regnum est, et ferri nullo pacto potest.

但这是君主制，绝对不能容忍。

But this is kingship, and can in no wise be tolerated.

西塞罗，《致阿提库斯的信》，第二卷第十二章第一节

Cicero, Letter to Atticus, ii.12.1

…et ingrata genti quies et facilius inter ancipitia clarescunt magnumque comitatum non nisi vi belloque tueare。

…et ingrata genti quies et facilius inter ancipitia clarescunt magnumque comitatum non nisi vi belloque tueare.

德国人不喜欢和平；他们在危机时刻更容易脱颖而出，除了战争时期，你不会看到他们大量出现。

Peace is disliked by the [German] nation; they distinguish themselves more easily in a crisis and you will not see them in large numbers except in wartime.

塔西佗，《日耳曼尼亚志》，14.2

Tacitus, Germania, 14.2

想要她 dô ar arme wuntane baugš, cheisuhngu gitšn, so imo se der chuning gap ,

Want her dô ar arme wuntane baugš, cheisuhngu gitšn, sô imo se der chuning gap,

Huneô truhtîn：“dat ih dir it nŭ bi huldî gibu。”哈杜布兰特·吉马哈尔塔·希尔蒂布兰德·苏努

Huneô truhtîn: ‘dat ih dir it nŭ bi huldî gibu.’ Hadubrant gimahalta Hiltibrandes sunu

“Mit gěru seal man geba infšhan, ort widar orte。”

’Mit gěru seal man geba infšhan, ort widar orte.’

他从手臂上取下用金币制成的扭曲的托雷斯，那是匈奴王赠予他的：“现在我把这个作为友谊的礼物送给你。”希尔德布兰德之子哈杜布兰德回应道：

He took from his arm twisted tores worked with specie gold, given him by the king, lord of the Huns: ‘This I now give you in friendship.’ Rejoined Hadubrand, son of Hildebrand:

“用长矛夺取礼物，点对点地攻击。”

’With spears are gifts to be taken, point against point.’

希尔德布兰德之歌，33-8

Hildebrandslied, 33-8

命运逆转

Reversals of fortune

在我们已知证据的三千年欧洲历史中，凯尔特语系、意大利语系、日耳曼语系和斯拉夫语系这四个密切相关的语系兴衰更迭主导着欧洲的历史进程。在每个时代，它们在欧洲大陆的扩张都伴随着战争：它们所歌颂的英雄事迹中都蕴含着令人压抑的残酷。但正如这些语言本身一样，它们孕育的文化也体现了不同民族的特征，每个民族都拥有截然不同的价值观。

The history of Europe, over the three thousand years for which we have evidence, is dominated by the changing fortunes of four closely related families of languages: Celtic, Italic, Germanic and Slavonic. In every age, their advances across the continent have been warlike: there is a depressing brutality about the heroics in which they all gloried. But like the languages themselves, the cultures they fostered characterise different peoples, each with rather different values.

本章聚焦于这段历史的关键时期，见证了整个西欧地区通用语言的重大转变，从凯尔特语向拉丁语的转变。这种语言转变无疑是军事征服的结果，其清晰性至今仍体现在欧洲人对语言变化的日常认知中：控制，以及与之相辅相成的军事和经济实力。然而，仿佛是为了警示这种简单观点的不足，这场征服本身也遭遇了失败。在经历了五百年的稳定之后，一场波及范围极广、无法挽回的军事灾难打破了军事平衡：事实上，它奠定了沿用至今的政治和国界格局。尽管这一切在西方大部分地区几乎没有造成语言上的影响，但在英国和巴尔干地区，它却产生了决定性的影响。

This chapter focuses on the crucial part of that history, which witnessed a major shift in ambient language, all over western Europe, from Celtic to Latin. This linguistic shift was unambiguously due to military conquest, and the sheer clarity of it lives on to this day in Europe’s everyday conception of what changes languages: control, backed by military and economic strength. And yet, as if to provide an object lesson in the inadequacy of that simple view, this conquest was itself overwhelmed. After half a millennium of stability, the military balance was overturned in a wide-ranging military catastrophe from which there was no recovery: indeed, it set the pattern of political and national boundaries that has lasted to the present day. Yet while the linguistic effect of all this in most of the West was nil, in Britain, and in the Balkans, it proved decisive.

从整体上看，这关键的一千年历史（大约从公元前500年到公元500年）具有某种对称性。它始于以血缘关系为基础的机动军事社会的胜利，也终于血缘关系的胜利——开端是凯尔特人，结尾是日耳曼人和斯拉夫人。在这两者之间，我们看到了公民社会的胜利，它统一了欧洲，组织了防御，并通过维护良好的道路和巡逻严密的海上航线，提供了畅通无阻的交通网络。

Looked at as a whole, the history of these crucial thousand years, approximately from 500 BC to AD 500, has a certain symmetry. It begins and ends with the triumph of mobile military societies organised round kinship relations, the Celts at the outset, the Germans and Slavs at the close. In between, we see the triumph of a civic society, which unified Europe, organised its defences and provided good communications throughout, through well-kept roads and well-patrolled sea routes.

在最初的250年里，高卢劫掠者（凭借当时最先进的铁器武器技术）统治了整个欧洲大陆，随后定居下来。他们可能参与了沿大西洋沿岸的大规模贸易，这也传播了他们的语言。之后，在接下来的250年里，他们逐渐被组织更严密、战略意识更强的罗马人所击败。具有讽刺意味的是，只有当劫掠者开始联合起来，在维钦托列的领导下共同防御时，他们才最终被彻底击败。此后四百年间，罗马帝国保持稳定，有效地抵御了来自德国的持续移民压力。在来自北亚和东亚的更大压力下，这种抵抗最终瓦解，先是零星爆发，然后彻底崩溃；最后的一百年里，罗马帝国只能眼睁睁地看着新的劫掠者随意出入旧帝国的领土，并承受由此带来的后果。

For the first 250 years, Gaulish raiders (backed by the best weapons technology available, in iron) dominate the continent, then settle down. They may have participated then in large-scale trade up and down the Atlantic coast, which also spread their language. Then, over a period of 250 years, they are gradually but systematically overwhelmed, by a better-organised and strategically self-conscious foe, the Romans. Ironically, it is only when the raiders begin to unify and organise themselves jointly for defence (under Vercingetorix) that they can be undone with finality. Four hundred years of stability ensue, while the Roman empire effectively resists continuing pressure for immigration from Germany. Under greater stress (originating in north and east Asia), the resistance fails, first sporadically, then totally; and the last hundred years are spent watching the effects of allowing new sets of raiders to pass as they will through the old imperial domains.

总而言之，这一时期语言的重大变化——拉丁语在意大利、高卢和伊比利亚半岛的传播，英语在不列颠的传播，以及斯拉夫语在巴尔干半岛的传播——是文化发生重大变革的最佳标志。那些征服之后却未能带来重大语言变革的例子，则暴露了许多军事荣耀的空洞本质——例如法兰克人、汪达尔人和西哥特人在西欧的征服，甚至罗马人和诺曼人在不列颠的征服。

All in all, the major changes of language in this period, the spread of Latin across Italy, and into Gaul and Iberia, the spread of English in Britain, and the spread of Slavic in the Balkans, are the best markers of serious cultural change. The cases where serious language change failed to follow on from conquests expose the hollowness of much military glory—the conquests in western Europe by Franks, Vandals and Visigoths, even the conquests in Britain by Romans and Normans.

现在，让我们更详细地探讨这个故事。要忘却近几个世纪人们熟知的历史，去了解这些语言最初的面貌，需要付出一些努力。或许最好的切入点，是看看那些始终充满好奇心，但在这个例子中却置身事外的旁观者——希腊人——是如何看待这些语言的。

We now turn to look at this tale in more detail. It costs some effort to forget the well-known recent centuries, and see these languages as they appeared at the beginning. Perhaps the best way to begin is to consider how they appeared to those ever curious, but in this case uninvolved, bystanders, the Greeks.

竞争者：希腊和罗马的观点

The contenders: Greek and Roman views

凯尔特人

The Celts

起初，希腊人只是将凯尔特人视为其世界格局的构成要素之一：公元前五世纪的希罗多德写道，他们居住在伊斯特罗斯河（多瑙河）的源头，是除库涅特人之外，欧洲所有民族中最西端的地区。¹^他将凯尔特人的位置定在赫拉克勒斯之柱以西，实际上位于今天葡萄牙所在的大西洋沿岸，正如一个世纪后的历史学家埃福罗斯^²所做的那样，西边是凯尔特人，北边是斯基泰人。这个故事带有某种传统传说的色彩，让人想起中国古代的世界观，即文明世界被未知的蛮族四面包围（参见第四章“对外关系”，第158页）。但如果真是如此，那也只是一种幸运的猜测。根据现代证据，当时从多瑙河源头到伊比利亚半岛北部，都有凯尔特语使用者。

At the start the Greeks simply saw the Celts as one of the framing nations of their world: Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, says that they lived where the river Istros (Danube) came from, farthest west of all European nations, but for the Cynetes.¹ He places them beyond the Pillars of Hercules, effectively on the Atlantic coast where Portugal is today, just as the historian Ephorus² does a century later, Celts in the west, Scythians in the north. There was something of conventional legend in this story, reminiscent of the Chinese world image which saw the familiar, civilised, world surrounded on all sides by unknown barbarians (see Chapter 4, ‘Foreign relations’, p. 158). But if so, the cliché had been a lucky guess. On modern evidence there were at the time Celtic speakers all the way across from the source of the Danube to the north of Iberia.

他们最早真正出现是在公元前335年年轻的亚历山大王子接见来自亚得里亚海沿岸的凯尔特使节的故事中。据说，这件事是由他的朋友托勒密记录下来的，而托勒密后来恰巧成为了埃及国王。^托勒密说，这些使节身材高大，自视甚高，并用一句名言证明了这一点。他们向亚历山大表达了友谊——当时他的帝国扩张尚未开始——但当亚历山大问他们是否感到害怕时，他们宣称只有一件事让他们感到恐惧，那就是天有一天可能会塌下来砸到他们。这句话后来成为凯尔特人夸夸其谈的代名词，但这似乎是对凯尔特誓言的一种误解。一千年后，爱尔兰人仍然在誓言：“除非繁星如雨般落下，笼罩大地；除非碧蓝的海洋覆盖世界；除非大地颤抖……” ^⁴

Their first real appearance is in the tale of the young prince Alexander’s reception of Celtic ambassadors from the coast of the Adriatic in 335 BC. It was apparently reported by his friend Ptolemy, who as it happened went on to be king of Egypt.³ They were big men, he says, in stature and in opinion of themselves, and demonstrated this with a famous remark. They offered their friendship to Alexander—his empire-building had then yet to begin—but when challenged by him to say whether they were frightened, they declared that there was only one thing which filled them with dread, and that was the thought that the sky might one day crash down on them. This remained a byword for Celtic grandiloquence, but it seems to have been a misunderstanding of a Celtic oath formula. A thousand years later, Irishmen were still binding themselves ‘unless the firmament with its showers of stars fall upon the earth, or unless the blue-bordered fish-abounding sea come over the face of the world, or unless the earth quake… ‘⁴

后来，凯尔特人（也称高卢人：希腊语为Galatai ，拉丁语为Galli——凯撒曾评论说Celtae是高卢人自己的说法^⁵）确实获得了一定的名声。历史学家狄奥多罗斯·西库鲁斯在公元前一世纪末期对此进行了详尽的描述，他很可能是根据希腊博学家波西多尼乌斯的个人研究成果撰写的^⁶ 。据说，凯尔特人身材高挑、体态轻盈、肤色白皙，头发常常用石灰漂白，贵族们留着遮住嘴巴的胡须，这些胡须实际上可以当作酒漏。（这个笑话已经有两千多年的历史了。）他们的语言低沉而粗犷。他们并非缺乏才华或技巧，但缺乏目标明确性，喜欢用格言和谜语进行简洁的交谈。然而，在战斗前，当需要吹捧自己或贬低对手时，他们就会变得滔滔不绝。他们身着色彩鲜艳的服装，斗篷通常是格子图案，而且——这是古代世界的一个显著特征——男士穿着裤子，称为“bracae ^”。

Subsequently the Celts (also known as Gauls: Galatai in Greek, Galli in Latin—Caesar comments that Celtae is the Gauls’ own word⁵) did gain a certain reputation. It is set out at length by the historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the late first century BC, and probably following the personal researches of the Greek polymath Posidonius.⁶ Physically, they were supposed to be tall, lithe and fair, often with their hair artificially bleached with lime, the nobles sporting moustaches that covered their mouths and served as de facto wine-strainers. (This particular joke is over two thousand years old.) Their language sounded deep and altogether harsh. They were not without flair or subtlety, but did lack fixity of purpose, delighting to talk tersely in aphorisms and riddles. Nevertheless, they grew wordy when the time came to build themselves up, or belittle an opponent, in the lead-up to a fight. They dressed in bright colours, with cloaks often in check patterns, and—distinctively in the ancient world—the men wore trousers, called bracae^*

德国人

The Germans

至于日耳曼人，希腊人往往将他们与凯尔特人混淆：毕竟，他们都居住在西北方向的某个地方，而且当时没有人想到要去探究这些晦涩难懂的语言之间是否存在显著差异。† 对古代人来说，清晰的区分特征只能是文化上的；从语言学的角度来看，所能做的最好的事情就是注意到一个部落难以理解另一个部落的语言。

As for the Germans, the Greeks tended to confuse them with the Celts: after all, they all lived somewhere to the north-west, and no one had yet thought to look for significant differences among such impenetrably barbarous tongues.† For the ancients, clear distinguishing features could only be cultural; linguistically, the best that could be done was to note that one tribe had difficulty understanding another.

即使在公元一世纪，凯撒征服高卢直至莱茵河之后，希腊人斯特拉波也未能对日耳曼人做出太多描述。 ⁷他们居住在莱茵河以东，比凯尔特人更野性、更高大、更俊美，但在其他方面却非常相似。事实上，在斯特拉波看来，他们与凯尔特人如此相似，以至于他将他们的名字“Germani ”解释为拉丁语中“彻头彻尾的凯尔特人”的意思。凯撒似乎将莱茵河划为分界线，但几乎没有考古或铭文证据支持他的说法，他很可能只是将这条河作为征服的天然边界。尽管如此，这条河很快就成为了罗马帝国的永久边界，这意味着从此以后，高卢人和日耳曼人在政治上（即使不是在种族上）都将沿着这条线被分割开来。

Even writing in the first century AD, after Caesar had subdued Gaul up to the Rhine, the Greek Strabo could not give much of a description of the Germans.⁷ Living to the east of the Rhine, they were wilder, bigger and fairer than the Celts, but otherwise very similar. In fact, so quintessentially similar did they appear to Strabo that he etymologised their name Germani, as the Latin for ‘out and out [Celts]’. Caesar seems to have been responsible for setting the Rhine as a divider, but there is precious little evidence, archaeological or inscriptional, to back up his distinction, and he probably took the river as a convenient natural boundary to his conquests. Nevertheless, this did soon become the permanent boundary of the Roman empire, which meant that henceforth Gauls and Germans would be politically, if not ethnically, divided along this line.

凯撒认为，日耳曼社会比高卢社会更为简单，没有农业，但更注重军事实力，也更不善于形成大规模的社群。或许正是这一点，揭示了日耳曼人长期抵御罗马征服的秘诀。

Caesar’s view was that German society was simpler than that of the Gauls, without agriculture but more polarised around military prowess, and less capable of forming large-scale communities. In this he may have uncovered the secret of the Germans’ long-term success in fending off Roman conquest.

一个半世纪后，塔西佗在其著作《日耳曼尼亚志》中重申了莱茵河是高卢和日耳曼之间的主要分界线，尽管他也提到有一些日耳曼部落越过了莱茵河。他还对日耳曼社会的特征进行了经典的描述，正如波西多尼乌斯和凯撒对高卢所做的那样。他认为日耳曼社会是由许多孤立的小家庭组成的，即使远远地看到邻居家的烟囱冒出的烟，他们也会感到拥挤，只有在战争中追求荣耀这种崇高目标时才会聚集在一起。他颇为赞赏日耳曼人平等的成长环境、在恶劣条件下保持的强健体魄以及朴素的道德观。

A century and a half later, the basic separation between Gaul and German at the Rhine was reiterated by Tacitus in his treatise Germania, although he noted that there were a few German tribes who had crossed over. He also provided the classic treatment of the character of German society, as Posidonius and Caesar had done for Gaul. He saw them as a society of small isolated families, feeling crowded if they could see their neighbours’ chimney smoke even in the distance, and coming together only for the ennobling purpose of glory in war. He rather admired their egalitarian upbringing, physical fitness in harsh conditions, and simple morality.

^事实上，这个词源自日耳曼语。除了马裤或短裤之外，它还是凯尔特语中表示鞋类的词语“布洛克鞋”的词根。

^* In fact, this word is borrowed from Germanic. Besides breeks or britches, it underlies the Celtic word for footwear, brogues.

† 事实上，直到 1599 年，约瑟夫·尤斯图斯·斯卡利杰才开始寻找这种差异，他根据拉丁语、希腊语、日耳曼语和斯拉夫语中对上帝的不同称呼对其进行了分类。

† Such differences would in fact not be sought until 1599, when Joseph Justus Scaliger classified Latin, Greek, Germanic and Slavonic languages through their different words for God.

根据当时的古高卢铭文，以及后来凯尔特语和日耳曼语两大语系的演变，我们现在知道凯尔特语和日耳曼语之间存在着实质性的语言差异。在公元前和公元后几个世纪，伊比利亚半岛北部、高卢、意大利北部，甚至在德国南部多瑙河畔的曼兴（尽管只有凯尔特人名）都发现了用可辨识的凯尔特语（伊比利亚语、希腊语、伊特鲁里亚语和罗马字母书写）书写的纪念碑铭文。同样，从公元前一世纪的斯洛文尼亚到两百年后的丹麦，在一些小型便携物品（例如武器和安全别针）上也发现了可辨识的日耳曼语铭文（用卢恩字母书写）。从我们目前掌握的极其有限的证据来看，凯撒对高卢语和日耳曼语的区分似乎是真实的，但在如今的德国西部和奥地利地区，这两种语言的使用范围存在着很大的重叠。

We now know, on the basis of contemporary Gaulish inscriptions, and the subsequent development of the languages into the distinct families of Celtic and Germanic, that there were substantive linguistic divisions between Celt and German. There are monumental inscriptions in discernibly Celtic languages (in Iberian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman scripts) from the first centuries BC and AD from all over northern Iberia, Gaul, northern Italy and even (though only of Celtic names) in southern Germany, at Manching on the Danube. Likewise, discernibly Germanic inscriptions (written in the runic alphabet) have been found on small portable items such as weapons and safety pins (fibulae), from Slovenia in the first century BC to Denmark two hundred years later. From the extremely sketchy evidence we have, it seems that Caesar’s Gallic/Germanic distinction was real, but that there was a major overlap of the languages’ spheres in the area that today comprises western Germany and Austria.

罗马人

The Romans

比希腊人未能区分高卢语和日耳曼语的本质更有趣的是，他们对罗马人的态度发生了变化，罗马人是西欧语言传播的第三个竞争者。

More interesting than the Greeks’ failure to distinguish the essence of the Gaul and the German was their evolving attitude to the Romans, the third contender for linguistic spread over western Europe.

古典希腊文学中没有任何迹象预示罗马的命运。现存最早提及这座城市的文献是公元前四世纪亚里士多德的一篇残篇。 ⁸他在探讨集体用餐起源时，也提到了邻近的奥斯坎人（希腊语为“Opikoí”，又称“Aúsones”），并引用了希腊殖民者的编年史。但他并未提及罗马人在上个世纪所采用的全新宪法——废除国王制，建立由两名民选执政官组成的平等共和政体。

There is nothing to pre-figure the destiny of Rome in classical Greek literature. The first surviving mention of the city is from the fourth century BC, in a fragment of Aristotle.⁸ He also mentions their neighbours the Oscans (’Opikoí, also called Aúsones’) in a global discussion of the origins of communal dining, quoting chroniclers of the Greek colonists. But he does not mention the radically new constitution that the Romans had adopted in the past century, abolishing kings and instituting a republic under the balanced equality of two elected consuls.

显然，最早接触拉丁语使用者的希腊人应该是殖民者：他们可能将拉丁语使用者视为伊特鲁里亚人眼中的一抹地方色彩。伊特鲁里亚人控制着皮特库萨（伊斯基亚）和库迈（库迈）希腊定居点的陆地一侧。正是这些希腊殖民者，在五百多年的时间里，见证了罗马——拉提姆地区的主要城市——从伊特鲁里亚人的统治下逐渐崛起，最终获得独立，并在意大利本土各民族中占据主导地位。有一个故事（^9）记载，公元前323年，罗马人派遣了众多前往巴比伦的使团之一，祝贺亚历山大成为波斯帝国的新君主。如果属实，这可能表明他们当时已经听闻亚历山大计划将征服的目光转向西方。而这比罗马人对东地中海地区产生任何实质性兴趣早了150年。

Evidently, the first Greeks to encounter Latin speakers would have been colonists: they probably saw them as a bit of local colour among the Etruscans who controlled the landward side of the Greek settlements at Pithecusae (Ischia) and Kyme (Cumae). It would have been Greek colonists then who, over five hundred years, witnessed the gradual emergence of Rome, chief city of the region of Latium, from domination by Etruscans to independence and then commanding influence among the indigenous nations of Italy. There is a story⁹ that in 323 BC the Romans sent one of the many deputations that went to Babylon to congratulate Alexander, the new master of the Persian empire. If true, it probably shows that they had heard rumours that he next planned to turn his conquering attentions to the west. This was 150 years before the Romans had any serious interests in the eastern Mediterranean.

希腊人对罗马在全球政治中的胜利方式着迷，并开始尝试从理论上解释这种现象。公元前167年，波利比乌斯被从希腊流放到意大利（他的父亲是一位杰出的亚该亚政治家），但他充分利用了这一机会结识了罗马精英阶层：之后，他毕生致力于撰写一部关于“几乎整个有人居住的世界是如何以及通过何种政体被罗马统治的……”的著作。 ¹⁰ 事实上，尽管他认识许多罗马的领军人物或他们的子孙后代，并细致地重构了公元前220年以来的事件和动机，但他并没有给出这个问题的简单答案。不过，他确实强调了罗马人留下的道德印象：“意大利人在体力和个人勇气方面普遍优于腓尼基人和非洲人，但与此同时，他们的制度也极大地促进了年轻人勇敢精神的培养。” ¹¹他还提到罗马人对死后神罚的恐惧（尽管这可能是一种迷信），认为这种恐惧促进了诚实：“无论如何，结果是，在希腊人中，撇开其他因素不谈，担任公职的人即使有十个会计、同样多的印章和两倍的证人，也无法被信任保管哪怕一塔兰特的钱财；而在罗马人中，他们的官员经手大笔资金，并且一丝不苟地履行职责，因为他们已经宣誓效忠。” ¹²罗马人或许不如希腊人文明，但他们身上确实有某种特质给希腊人留下了深刻的印象。

Greeks were fascinated by Rome’s winning ways in global politics, and characteristically began to theorise some sort of explanation. Polybius had made the best of his deportation from Greece to Italy in 167 BC (his father had been a prominent Achaean politician) by getting to know the Roman elite: he then devoted much of his life to writing an account of ‘how and by what kind of government almost the whole inhabited world was brought under Roman rule …’¹⁰ In the event, although he knew many of the Roman protagonists or their children and grandchildren, and reconstructed a meticulous narrative of events and motives since 220 BC, he offers no simple answer to his question. But he does stress the moral impression made by the Romans: ‘Italians in general have a natural advantage over Phoenicians and Africans both in physical strength and personal courage, but at the same time their institutions contribute very powerfully towards fostering a spirit of bravery in their young men.’¹¹ He also cites the Roman fear of divine retribution after death, superstition though it may be, as fostering honesty: ‘At any rate, the result is that among the Greeks, apart from anything else, men who hold public office cannot be trusted with the safekeeping of so much as a single talent, even if they have ten accountants and as many seals and twice as many witnesses, whereas among the Romans their magistrates handle large sums of money and scrupulously perform their duty because they have given their word on oath.’¹² Less cultivated the Romans might be; but there was something about them that impressed the Greeks.

两百年后，埃及、叙利亚、小亚细亚和高卢都已并入罗马的版图，罗马的统治地位似乎已成为不争的事实。然而，即便如此，希腊人仍然认为罗马人远不及自己强大。斯特拉波在对世界地理进行考察时，仍然将除塔兰托、那不勒斯和雷焦这三个希腊飞地之外的意大利南部视为蛮族领土，原因很简单，就是因为这些地区已被罗马人占领。 ¹³

Two hundred years later, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor and Gaul had been added to Roman domains, and Roman dominance must have come to seem a fact of nature. Nevertheless, even then Greeks did not think of the Romans as quite on a par with themselves. Strabo, in the midst of a review of the geography of the whole world, still sees southern Italy outside the remaining Greek enclaves of Tarentum, Naples and Rhegium as barbarian territory, explicitly because it has been taken over by Romans.¹³

具有讽刺意味的是，意大利南部这片区域直到公元前一世纪都保留着自己的语言，罗马人称之为奥斯坎语，希腊人称之为奥皮克语。这种语言与拉丁语相关，但差异之大，正如德语与英语之别。奥斯坎语曾经比拉丁语的使用范围更广；例如，罗马早期的对手萨宾人（罗马人曾掳掠萨宾妇女）和萨姆尼特人就使用奥斯坎语。

Ironically, this southern region was the area of Italy that had retained its own language until the first century BC, a language known as Oscan to the Romans, Opic to the Greeks. This language, related to Latin but as different from it as German is from English, had once been spoken far more widely than Latin; it had been the language, for example, of the Romans’ early rivals, the Sabines (whose women the Romans had famously stolen) and the Samnites.

事实上，当希腊人想要贬低罗马人时，他们喜欢称罗马统治者为“奥皮科伊”（Opikoí）。 “他们总是称我们为蛮族，用‘奥皮克人’（ opics）这个名字来侮辱我们，比其他人更加恶毒，”出了名的古板的马库斯·加图抱怨道。¹⁴这种侮辱似乎源于缺乏教育，因为这个词后来被拉丁语借用，成了文盲的代名词。尤维纳利斯曾提到一位迂腐的女士斥责她那“奥皮克人”女友用词不当。 ¹⁵ “奥皮克人”（opic）这个词用错了。这又是一个残酷的讽刺。难道他们忘记了，第一个将希腊韵律运用到罗马诗歌中的诗人，昆图斯·恩尼乌斯本人就是一位奥斯坎语使用者吗？恩尼乌斯喜欢吹嘘说，他的三种语言赋予了他三颗心。¹⁶他的母语是奥斯坎语，因为他在意大利“靴子”的卡拉布里亚长大；他懂希腊语，因为他居住的大城市是塔兰托；他在罗马军队服役期间，参与了对抗汉尼拔的战争，并因此学会了拉丁语。两百五十年后，在罗马一年一度的哑剧表演中，人们仍然可以听到奥斯坎最后的微弱回响^。17

In fact, when they wanted to put them down, the Greeks liked to refer to their Roman masters as Opikoí. ‘They keep calling us barbarians and insult us more foully than others with the name of opics,’ the proverbially stiff Marcus Cato complained.¹⁴ The point of this slur seems to have been lack of education, since the word was being borrowed back into Latin as a byword for illiteracy. Juvenal talks about a pedantic lady telling off her ‘opic’ girlfriend for using the wrong word.’¹⁵ ‘Opic’ was malapropic. This was another cruel irony. Had they forgotten that the first poet to adapt Greek metrics for use in Roman poetry had himself been an Oscan speaker, Quintus Ennius? Ennius had liked to boast that his three languages gave him three hearts.¹⁶ His mother tongue had been Oscan, as he grew up in Calabria, in the heel of Italy; he knew Greek, because his local big city was Tarentum; and he had learnt Latin serving in the Roman army in the war against Hannibal. Two hundred and fifty years later, the last faint echoes of Oscan could still be heard, in the annual mime shows at Rome.¹⁷

斯拉夫人

The Slavs

某种程度上，试图将希腊人对罗马人的看法与他们对凯尔特人或日耳曼人的看法进行比较是徒劳的。凯尔特人和日耳曼人或许曾热情款待过陌生人，但公元前二世纪之后，希腊人和罗马人之间的关系更像是联姻（参见第六章“罗马人的欢迎：希腊文化的传播”，第250页）。另一方面，斯拉夫人只有在强势入侵希腊之后，才成为欧洲语言版图上的重要一环。可以理解的是，早期希腊人的描述中鲜有同情的见解，而且这些描述本身也是在斯拉夫人步步紧逼巴尔干半岛和希腊本土之后才写成的（参见第六章“衰落的预兆”，第262页）。不过在此之前，塔西佗（在其公元 98 年出版的《日耳曼尼亚志》中）对他们的祖先维内蒂人（后来被称为温德人或索布人）和芬尼人（其名称后来被用来指代芬兰人，但他们可能是斯拉夫人）做了一些评论。

In a way, trying to get a Greek view of the Romans to compare with their view of the Celts or Germans is unrewarding. The Celts and Germans may have been entertaining strangers, but after the second century BC the relationship between the Greeks and the Romans became more like a marriage (see Chapter 6, ‘A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture’, p. 250). The Slavs, on the other hand, became a factor in the language map of Europe only when they forcibly made their presence felt on the Greeks. Understandably, there is little sympathetic insight in the early Greek descriptions, which were in any case written much later, when they were bearing down on the Balkans and Greece itself (see Chapter 6, ‘Intimations of decline’, p. 262). Prior to this, though, Tacitus (in his Germania, AD 98) has some remarks to make on their ancestors, the Veneti (latterly known as the Wends, or Sorbs) and Fenni (whose name was later given to the Finns, but who may have been Slavs).

佩乌奇尼人、维内西人和芬尼人这几个部落，我犹豫着该把他们归类为日耳曼人还是萨尔马提亚人…… ¹⁸维内西人从他们（萨尔马提亚人）那里带来了许多习俗：他们掠夺佩乌奇尼人（南部）和芬尼人（北部）之间整片森林和山脉的资源。但他们更像日耳曼人，因为他们建造房屋，使用盾牌，喜欢徒步快速行进：这与居住在马车和马背上的萨尔马提亚人截然不同。芬尼人的野蛮程度令人震惊，他们的贫困程度令人发指：他们没有武器，没有马匹，没有房屋：他们以草为食，身穿兽皮，睡在地上；他们唯一的资源是箭，由于缺乏铁器，箭尖是用骨头磨尖的。同样的狩猎活动养活了男女：他们形影不离，争夺猎物。孩子们除了用树枝编织的简易棚子外，没有其他遮风挡雨的地方，既没有躲避野兽也没有躲避暴雨；年轻人回到这里，老人们也来这里避难。但他们认为这比在田里呻吟、在房子里干活、在希望和恐惧中碰运气要幸福得多；他们不在乎人，不在乎神灵，却取得了非凡的成就，甚至不需要任何愿望^。19

The tribes of Peucini, Venethi and Fenni, I hesitate whether to classify as Germans or Sarmatians…¹⁸ The Venethi have brought many customs from them [the Sarmatians]: they prey on the whole range of woods and mountains between the Peucini [in the south] and the Fenni [in the north]. But they are more like Germans, since they build houses, use shields, and like to move on foot and fast: this is all very different from the Sarmatians who live in wagons and on horseback. The Fenni’s savagery is amazing, their poverty appalling: they have no arms, no horses, no homes: they live on grass, dress in skins, sleep on the ground; their only resource is arrows, sharpened with bone for lack of iron. The same hunting sustains both men and women: they accompany each other everywhere, and claim their share of the prey. The children have no shelter from beasts or showers beyond the covering woven from branches, and this is where youths return, and old people take refuge. But they think this is happier than groaning in fields, working in houses, and trying their and others’ fortunes in hope and fear; they have no care for people, no care for gods, but have achieved something of outstanding difficulty, not even to need to wish for anything.¹⁹

公元二世纪中叶，托勒密的著作中也提到了威尼蒂人，称他们为“乌埃内代人” （Ouenédai），一个“占据萨尔马提亚沿威尼蒂湾一带的庞大民族”。显然，当时他们居住在波罗的海沿岸^。20

The Veneti also appear in the pages of Ptolemy, mid-second century AD, as the Ouenédai, a ‘very large nation occupying Sarmatia along the whole Venetic Gulf’. Apparently then they were living along the Baltic shore.²⁰

Rún：凯尔特人的冲动性优势

Rún: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts

Rún：（a）隐藏的或神秘的事物，谜团；隐藏的含义；（b）秘密；（c）秘密的想法或愿望，意图，目的；（d）完全的意识，知识；（e）亲爱的，爱。

Rún: (a) something hidden or occult, a mystery; hidden meaning; (b) a secret; (c) secret thoughts or wishes, intention, purpose; (d) full consciousness, knowledge; (e) darling, love.

爱尔兰皇家学院，《爱尔兰语词典》

Royal Irish Academy, Dictionary of the Irish Language

凯尔特人的起源尚不明确，但当这种文化首次被人们所知时，它已经位于西欧的中心地带。

Celtic origins are obscure, but when first heard of this culture was already seated at the heart of western Europe.

从考古学角度来看，它们与一种文化，或者更确切地说，是一系列文化的传承相联系，其典型代表首先是奥地利的哈尔施塔特遗址（公元前13至6世纪），随后是瑞士新希斯特尔湖畔的拉坦诺遗址（公元前6至1世纪）。这些遗址以及其他类似的遗址共同定义了中欧铁器时代的生活方式。在这两个遗址中，由于盐分和沼泽地的保护，这些物品保存完好，包括武器、青铜器和陶器、珠宝、服装、木制工具、别针、皮带扣、剃刀和轮式车辆。装饰风格中繁复的漩涡和螺旋纹饰，至今仍被视为凯尔特风格，并十分明显。

Archaeologically, they are identified with the culture, or rather succession of cultures, typified first by the Hallstatt site in Austria (dated thirteenth to sixth centuries BC), and then by the La Tène site on Lake Neufchštel in Switzerland (from the sixth to the first century BC). Together with comparable sites, these defined the Iron Age way of life as experienced in central Europe. Their material goods, well preserved by salt and by marshland respectively in the two sites, include weapons, bronze and ceramic vessels, jewellery, clothing, wooden tools, pins, buckles, razors and wheeled vehicles. The decorative style with elaborate swirls and spirals, which we still see as Celtic, is very much in evidence.

由此，我们便了解了凯尔特人的家庭生活。那么，他们的语言生活又如何呢？

This, then, defined the home life of our Celts. What of their linguistic existence?

凯尔特语的痕迹

Traces of Celtic languages

凯尔特语传播最持久、最广为人知的证据莫过于其地名：凯尔特地名带有某种独特的韵味。凯尔特人建立的城镇名称通常带有后缀，例如-dūnum（堡垒）、- brīga（山丘）、- magus（平原）、- brīva（渡口）、- bona（定居点或泉水）。此外，凯尔特语中还明显存在一种自夸的倾向，例如sego-（强大的）、uxello-（高）等。从不列颠北部（哈德良长城两端的乌克塞洛杜努姆和塞格杜努姆）到伊比利亚半岛最南端（里斯本以南的塞图巴尔，即凯托布里加），从英吉利海峡（鲁昂，即罗托马古斯）到多瑙河（维也纳，即维也纳，贝尔格莱德，即辛吉杜努姆），都能找到这类地名。问题在于，这种词源学解释过于简单，甚至可能导致一些城镇仅仅出于情感因素而被赋予凯尔特语名称。值得注意的是，其中许多城镇是在罗马统治时期建立的：高卢的尤利奥博纳、奥古斯托杜鲁姆、凯撒罗马古斯，以及西班牙的弗拉维奥布里加、奥古斯托布里加、尤利奥布里加。然而，仅凭一个地名很难证明其来源语言在命名时就已被使用。

The longest-lasting, and most widely broadcast, evidence of the spread of Celtic languages is given by their place names: Celtic place names have a certain feel to them. Towns set up by Celts would often have suffixes such as -dūnum, ‘fort’, -brīga, ‘hill’, -magus, ‘plain’, -brīva, ‘crossing’, -bona, ‘settlement’ or ‘spring’. There is also a recognisably Celtic tendency to self-congratulation: sego-, ‘powerful’, uxello-, ‘high’. Such names can be found from the north of Britain (Uxellodunum to Segedunum at either end of Hadrian’s Wall) to the very south of Iberia (Caetobriga—Setúbal, just south of Lisbon), and from the English Channel (Rotomagus—Rouen) to the Danube (Vindobona—Vienna, Singidunum—Belgrade). The snag is that such etymologising is so easy it may even have led to some towns being given a Celtic name for purely sentimental reasons. It is noticeable that many of them were created under Roman rule: Iuliobona, Augustodurum, Caesaromagus in Gaul, Flaviobriga, Augustobriga, Iuliobriga in Spain. A single place name is hardly evidence that the language from which it is drawn was spoken when the name was given.

也可以直接参考那些在欧洲各地接触过或听说过凯尔特人的人的证词，这些人通常是希腊人或罗马人。斯特拉波记载，高卢人有三个部落，即博伊人、陶里斯^人和斯科迪斯人，他们与色雷斯人混居，这表明他们可能居住在巴尔干半岛附近。他还提到，斯科迪斯人居住在诺阿罗斯河（由科拉皮斯河汇流而成）注入多瑙河的河口附近。²¹现在查看地图可知，由库尔帕河汇流而成的河流实际上是萨瓦河，它在辛吉杜努姆（今贝尔格莱德）注入多瑙河。斯特拉波非常谨慎地区分高卢人与其他民族，例如，他指出巴斯塔奈人可能被认为是日耳曼人（vii.3.17），达契亚人和盖塔人说同一种语言（vii.3.13）。虽然他没有明确提及这些高卢人的语言，但公元1世纪，某种形式的高卢语似乎不仅在德国南部，而且一直延伸到今天的克罗地亚和塞尔维亚境内。

It is also possible just to take the testimony of people, usually Greeks or Romans, who met or knew of Celts in different parts of Europe. Strabo records that three tribes of Gauls, the Boii,^* Taurisci and Scordisci, were mixed up with the Thracians, which would place them towards the Balkans. He also says that the Scordisci lived near where the Noaros, the river swelled by the Kolapis, flows into the Danube.²¹ Now a look at the map shows that the river swelled by the Ku(l)pa is in fact the Sava, and it flows into the Danube at Singidunum, modern Belgrade. Strabo is quite careful to distinguish Gauls from other races, for example noting that the Bastarnae may be considered Germans (vii.3.17), and that the Dacians and Getai speak the same language (vii.3.13). Although he makes no explicit reference to the language of these Gauls, it would seem that in the first century AD some form of Gaulish would have been spoken not just in southern Germany, but down into what is now Croatia and Serbia.†

最后，还有当今各地使用的语言的证据。不列颠群岛至今使用的凯尔特语系语言，是罗马人在占领不列颠的四百年间（期间他们偶尔会造访爱尔兰）所了解到的当地语言的直接后裔。在法国西北部的布列塔尼地区，也延续着凯尔特语系语言的传统，尽管这种传统是否从未间断尚不明确；也就是说，布列塔尼语究竟是高卢语的延续，还是公元第一个千年从康沃尔郡重新传入的语言，或许两者兼而有之，并有所融合。

Finally, there is the evidence of what languages are spoken where today. The Celtic languages spoken in the British Isles up to the present day are the direct descendants of the indigenous tongues that the Romans heard about them over the four hundred years when Britain was occupied, and Ireland was visited occasionally. There is also a continuing Celtic-language tradition in the Breton corner in the north-west of France, even if it remains unclear whether this has been strictly unbroken; i.e. whether Breton is a continuation of Gaulish, or a reimport of the language from Cornwall in the first millennium AD. Perhaps it is both, remixed.

^博伊人是高卢人中一个分布广泛的部落，与波西米亚有着密切的联系（其名称词源为“博伊之家”，但源自日耳曼语而非凯尔特语），并在意大利东北部（博洛尼亚、帕尔马和摩德纳等现代城市周边地区）拥有重要的定居点。不知何故，他们也曾作为赫尔维蒂人的盟友出现在高卢南部，并于公元前58年在比布拉克特战役中被凯撒击败。根据兰伯特（1997：44）的说法，博伊人的名字意为“击打者”。

^* The Boii were well known as a far-flung tribe of Gauls, having connections with Bohemia (etymologically ‘Boii-home’, though in Germanic not Celtic) and having a major settlement in north-eastern Italy (around such modern cities as Bologna, Parma and Modena). Somehow they also showed up as allies of the Helvetii in southern Gaul, and were defeated by Caesar at Bibracte in 58 BC. The name means ‘hitters’, according to Lambert (1997: 44).

† 他们与西欧凯尔特人的关系尚不明确。事实上，南斯拉夫和匈牙利是所谓的瓮棺文化的核心地带，考古学家将其年代确定为公元前一千年上半叶，早于哈尔施塔特文化和拉坦诺文化的鼎盛时期。瓮棺文化位于铁器时代文明从爱琴海地区传播的路径上；因此，凯尔特人在这一地区的存在时间可能比在西欧更长。但作为凯尔特语使用者的历史学家，我们只能对与这些史前物质文化的联系持保留态度。

† How they were related to the Celts in western Europe is quite unclear. Yugoslavia and Hungary are in fact the heart of the so-called Urnfield culture, dated by archaeologists to the first half of the first millennium BC, and so preceding the high points of Hallstatt and La Tène. The Urnfield culture had been on the path of the spread of Iron Age civilisation from the Aegean; and so it is quite possible that Celts had been in this area even longer than in western Europe. But as historians of Celtic-language speakers, we can only be agnostic about the link to these prehistoric material cultures.

无论公元前三世纪他们经历了怎样的迁徙，我们都有证据表明，当时存在着许多很可能讲凯尔特语的民族，他们主要分布在西欧及其岛屿，但其活动范围也延伸至阿尔卑斯山脉南北两侧，直至达尔马提亚地区。他们大多是定居居民，居住在由道路连接起来的农耕村落中。拉丁语从高卢语中借用了大量表示轮式车辆的词汇（似乎是有意为之），这揭示了当时高卢人的一个特征：benna（轻便马车）、carrus（手推车）、cisiwn（敞篷马车）、carpentum（四轮马车）、essedum（战车）、raeda（四轮马车）。事实上，在许多拉坦诺文化墓葬中，精美的四轮马车都是重要的陪葬品。因此，尽管高卢社会基本上是定居的，但它在需要时也可以非常灵活地迁徙。

Whatever the travels that took them there by the third century BC, we therefore have evidence of a variety of peoples most likely speaking Celtic, predominating in western Europe and its islands but extending right round the Alps north and south, and on into Dalmatia. They were predominantly settled populations, living in farming villages with roads linking them. Latin has shown up one characteristic of contemporary Gaul by (quite consciously, it seems) borrowing from Gaulish so many words for wheeled vehicles: benna, ‘buggy’, carrus, ‘hand-cart’, cisiwn, ‘cabriolet’, carpentum, ‘carriage’, essedum, ‘war chariot’, raeda, ‘coach’. Indeed, magnificent four-wheeled carriages are significant grave-goods in many of the La Tène graves. So although basically settled, Gaulish society could also be very mobile when it chose.

但对语言学家而言，关于语言的使用地点和时间的最有力证据来自文字。由于凯尔特人直到公元五世纪的爱尔兰才拥有书面文学传统，这意味着我们主要依赖于铭文。这些铭文来自许多不同的地方。凯尔特人似乎只有在有邻居可以教他们识字的地方才识字。而这些地方分布确实非常分散，当然，它们往往位于凯尔特语区的边缘地带。遗憾的是，但也在意料之中，这些铭文并不包括与哈尔施塔特文化或拉坦诺文化相关的遗址。

But for linguists, the hardest evidence of where and when the language was used comes from writing. Since none of the Celts had a written literary tradition until fifth-century AD Ireland, this means that we are largely reliant on inscriptions. These come from many different places. Celts appear to have been literate only where they had neighbours who could teach them. And the places where this happened are far flung indeed, though naturally they tend to be on the margins of Celtic-speaking areas. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, they do not include sites equated with the Hallstatt or La Tène cultures.

如何识别凯尔特人

How to recognise Celtic

识别一段铭文为凯尔特语意味着要了解古代凯尔特语的特征。凯尔特语的一个重要特征是[p]音的消失。一些拉丁语基本词汇，如pater、piscis、plenus、super、pro（分别对应英语中的father、fish、full、over、before），在现代爱尔兰盖尔语中仍然以athair、iasc、lán、for、roimh的形式出现。同样的现象也可以在一些残存的高卢语或不列颠语中看到：萨福克郡拉克福德的不列颠语名称Cambo-ritum似乎意为“弯曲的浅滩”，其最后一个词根与威尔士语中的rhyd类似，意为“浅滩”（参见希腊语poros和拉丁语portus）。人们推测，凯撒和塔西佗提到的臭名昭著的“赫西尼亚森林”（如今的黑森林，但一直延伸到德国高地，直至现代莱比锡）的名称来源，很可能是一位凯尔特语使用者省略了“p”音：如果它的真名是Perkun，那么它就与一些日耳曼语中表示“山”的词（哥特语fairguni，古英语firgen ）相同，同时也与古拉丁语单词quercus（橡树）的词源有着巧妙的联系。很自然地，我们可以将其推导为^* perquus（参见已知的类似词，例如quinque（五），源自^* penque；coquo（厨师），源自^* pequo）。这样看来，它又与立陶宛神祇Perkūnas的名字非常相似，而Perkūnas正是以与橡树的关联而闻名^！

Recognising an inscription as Celtic means knowing something about the properties of ancient Celtic languages. It turns out that an important characteristic of Celtic was the loss of the sound [p]. Such Latin basic words as pater, piscis, plenus, super, pro (translated by their English relatives father, fish, full, over, before) turn up still in modern Irish Gaelic as athair, iasc, lán, for, roimh. The same phenomenon can be seen in some of the remaining vestiges of Gaulish or British: Cambo-ritum, the British name of Lackford in Suffolk, seems to mean ‘Crooked Ford’, the last element, like rhyd in Welsh, meaning ‘ford’ (cf. Greek poros, Latin portus). And it is conjectured that the source for the name of the notorious ‘Hercynian forest’ mentioned by Caesar and Tacitus (now the Black Forest, but extending all the way across the German highlands to modern Leipzig) must have been a Celtic speaker who dropped his Ps: if its real name were Perkun this would make it the same as some Germanic words for mountain (Gothic fairguni, Old English firgen), but also allow a nice tie-up with the origin of the old Latin word quercus, ‘oak’. It is natural to derive this from ^*perquus (cf. known parallels such as quinque, ‘five’, from ^*penque, coquo, ‘cook’, from ^*pequo). And then it looks very like the name of the Lithuanian god Perkūnas, known for his association with oak trees!^*

在其他方面，这一时期的凯尔特语与拉丁语惊人地相似。高卢语名词的词形变化系统比拉丁语略微复杂一些，有七个格，而拉丁语只有六个，但两者非常接近。例如，名词EQVOS（马）的属格是EQVI（马的）——这两个词在拉丁语和高卢语中完全相同。“他赐予尼姆的母亲们”在高卢语中是DEDE MATREBO NAMAUSIKABO；而在拉丁语中，它可以是^* DEDIT MATRIBUS NEMAUSICABUS。一段地道的日常高卢语可能与其拉丁语对应词非常接近：例如，纺锤轮上两段典型的活泼铭文：MONI GNATHA GABI BVθθVTON IMON和NATA VIMPI CURMI DA分别翻译为MEA NATA, CAPE MENTVLAM MEAM和NATA BELLA, CERVISIAM DA，意为“我的女孩，拿走我的小弟弟”和“漂亮的女孩，给我点啤酒” ^。22

In other ways, Celtic languages of the period are remarkably like Latin. The system of inflexion for Gaulish nouns was just a little more complex than the Latin one, with seven cases to Latin’s six, but tantalisingly close to it. So, for example, the noun EQVOS, ‘horse’, has the genitive EQVI, ‘horse’s’—the very same words in Latin and Gaulish. ‘He has given to the mothers of Nîmes’ comes out as DEDE MATREBO NAMAUSIKABO; in Latin it could be ^*DEDIT MATRIBUS NEMAUSICABUS. An everyday piece of authentic Gaulish could be very close to its Latin equivalent: take for examples two typically frisky inscriptions on spindle whorls: MONI GNATHA GABI BVθθVTON IMON and NATA VIMPI CURMI DA would translate to MEA NATA, CAPE MENTVLAM MEAM and NATA BELLA, CERVISIAM DA: ‘my girl, take my todger’ and ‘pretty girl, give some ale’.²²

按现代估算，这些分歧代表着大约一千五百年的独立发展，或六十代人的时间。尽管两者都是同一种语言的不同变体，但这段时间足以让每种变体发展出截然不同的传统。

On a modern estimate, these divergences would represent something like one and a half millennia of separate development, or sixty generations. Although both were speaking variants of what had once been the same language, this was enough time for very different traditions to have developed in each variant.

凯尔特识字

Celtic literacy

已知最早的凯尔特铭文（约公元前575年至公元前1年）发现于阿尔卑斯山南麓，靠近科莫湖和马焦雷湖。这里是莱蓬蒂人的家园。因此，他们的语言被称为莱蓬蒂语，并使用一种名为“卢加诺”的字母书写，这种字母显然是从伊特鲁里亚人那里借用的，伊特鲁里亚人是意大利北部主要的识字民族。^*这些铭文通常只有两三个词，这使得解读变得困难，而且很可能大部分词都是专有名词。

The earliest known Celtic inscriptions (from c.575 to 1 BC) are found in the southern foothills of the Alps near Lakes Como and Maggiore. This was the home of the Lepontii. Their language is hence known as Lepontic, and is written in a script, the ‘Lugano’ alphabet, evidently borrowed from the Etruscans, who were the dominant literate people in northern Italy.^* The texts are usually only two or three words long, which can make interpretation difficult, and it is likely that most of the words are proper names.

没有一位古典作家将莱蓬蒂人描述为凯尔特人（尽管波利比乌斯和李维的著作中都含糊地提到过该地区很早有高卢人定居）。 ²³然而，有理由将莱蓬蒂语视为凯尔特语的一种形式。它似乎失去了字母 P，用uer-和latu-分别取代了印欧语的uper-（意为“在……之上”）和platu-（意为“平坦的”）；它还有一些专有名词与高卢语非常相似，例如alKouinos，就像 Alkovindos 一样，都包含词根windo-（意为“白色的”），这个词根也出现在Winchester（曾被明确地称为Vin-dobona）和Guinevere 中。

No classical author characterised the Lepontii as Celts (despite vague rumours of a very early Gallic settlement of this region in Polybius and Livy).²³ Nevertheless, there are grounds for viewing Lepontic as a form of Celtic. It seems to have lost P, having uer- and latu- in place of Indo-European uper-, ‘over’, and platu-, ‘flat’; it also has some proper names very reminiscent of Gauls, for example alKouinos, like Alkovindos, which would contain the root windo-, ‘white’, seen also in Winchester (once more clearly called Vin-dobona) and Guinevere.

四百多年后，大约从公元前150年开始，同样的卢加诺字母以镜像对称（现在是从左到右）的形式，在更南边的诺瓦拉附近，被用来记录一种更清晰的高卢语。这便是因苏布里亚人留下的文字印记，他们在历史上曾入侵意大利北部。李维（《历史》第五卷第34章）记载，米兰城（高卢语意为“中原”）是由高卢移民建立的，他们欣喜地发现，因苏布里亚这个名字（他们熟悉这个名字，因为它是阿尔卑斯山另一侧家乡的一个州名）已经在附近地区出现。

Over four hundred years later, from about 150 BC, the same Lugano alphabet was used in mirror image (now left to right), a little farther south round Novara, to record a more clearly Gaulish language. This would be the written footprint of the Insubrians, who had invaded the north of Italy in the historic period. Livy (v.34) remarks that the city of Mediolanum (Milan—Gaulish for ‘mid-plain’) was founded by Gaulish incomers, pleased to find that the name Insubrian (familiar to them as a cantonal name in their homeland across the Alps) was already established in the neighbourhood.

这种典型的铭文内容是：

This typical inscription reads:

TANOTALIKNOI Dannotalos-son

KUITOS Quintos

LEKATOS 使节

ANOKOPOKIOS Andocombogios

SETUPOKIOS Setubogios

ESANEKOTI（Essandecotos 的儿子）

ANAREUIZEOS Andareuiseos

TANOTALOS Dannotalos

KARNITUS 建造了古墓

TANOTALIKNOI Dannotalos-son

KUITOS Quintos

LEKATOS the legate

ANOKOPOKIOS Andocombogios

SETUPOKIOS Setubogios

ESANEKOTI (sons) of Essandecotos

ANAREUIZEOS Andareuiseos

TANOTALOS Dannotalos

KARNITUS built the tumulus

旁边附有竖向注释：

with a vertical note at the side:

TAKOS TOUTAS 部落的决定

TAKOS TOUTAS decision of the tribe

但凯撒指出，高卢人最熟悉的文字是希腊文，果不其然，人们发现了公元前300年至公元50年间用希腊文书写的高卢铭文。如今的法国里维埃拉当时很大程度上是希腊的海岸，拥有尼西亚（尼斯）和安提波利斯（昂蒂布）等著名的殖民地，这些殖民地都以马赛（马赛）为中心，马赛大约建于公元前600年。迄今为止，已发现约70块刻有此类文字的石碑，其中大部分是墓碑和题词，此外还有220块带有文字的陶器碎片：这些古代的废纸、瓶罐等物品往往非常耐用，令人欣慰。

But Caesar notes that the most familiar script to the Gauls was Greek writing, and sure enough, Gaulish inscriptions written in Greek are found dating from 300 BC to AD 50. What is now the French Riviera was then very much a Greek coast, with notable colonies such as Nicaea (Nice) and Antipolis (Antibes), all focused on the metropolis of Massilia (Marseilles), which had been founded c.600 BC. There are about seventy such inscriptions on stone discovered so far, mostly gravestones and dedications, and there are also another 220 pieces of broken pottery with writing on them: this ancient equivalent of scrap paper and old bottles and cans is often gratifyingly durable.

塞戈马罗斯·乌伊洛内奥斯·托特乌斯·纳马乌萨蒂斯·伊奥鲁·贝莱萨米·索辛·内梅顿

segomaros uilloneos tooutious namausatis íorou belesami sosin nemeton

“内毛苏斯公民乌伊鲁之子塞戈马罗斯将这座神殿献给贝莱萨玛”

’Segomaros son of Uillu, citizen of Nemausus, dedicated to Belesama this shrine’

这些希腊字母铭文分布在沿海地区，一直延伸到罗讷河上游，在法国中部卢瓦尔河和塞纳河上游也有少量发现。凯撒曾提及用希腊语书写并保存在木板上的瑞士文献。但这已经是罗马征服高卢时期（公元前51年完成）了。此后，我们确实发现了用罗马字母书写的高卢语，但仅持续了一个世纪，而且从未真正取代希腊字母的使用：迄今为止，仅发现了十六处此类高卢-罗马铭文。这一时期最精美的遗存是一块刻在青铜上的德鲁伊教历残片，发现于科利尼，距离罗马行政中心卢格杜努姆（里昂）不远。

These Greek-lettered inscriptions are found along the coast, and all the way up the River Rhône, with a few more in the centre of France, on the upper reaches of the Loire and Seine. Caesar refers to Helvetian records written in Greek, and kept on wooden tablets. But this brings us well into the period of Rome’s conquest of Gaul (completed in 51 BC). Thereafter we do find Gaulish written in Roman letters, but only for a century, and never actually replacing the use of Greek script: there have only been sixteen such Gallo-Roman inscriptions discovered to date. The most magnificent remnant of this period yet discovered is a fragmentary Druidical calendar engraved on bronze found at Coligny, not far from the Roman administrative centre of Lugdunum (Lyon).

塞纳河北岸，目前发现的唯一铭文是陶工印章上的铭文，这些印章很可能来自更南边的地区。广告也可能使用“视觉冲击力强”的元素，其手法明显带有二十世纪的风格：铭文内容如下：

North of the Seine, the only inscriptions that have turned up are on potters’ stamps, which probably came from farther south. Advertising could also use ‘eye candy’ in a way decidedly reminiscent of the twentieth century: The inscription reads:

rextugenos sullias avvot Rextugenos（儿子）苏拉制作（这个锅）。

rextugenos sullias avvot Rextugenos (son) of Sulla made (this pot).

除此之外，高卢语书写的唯一证据是德国南部曼兴出土的陶罐上的一些凯尔特人名字，以及瑞士西部波特出土的一把剑上的一些凯尔特人名字。

Otherwise, the only evidence of written Gaulish is a few Celtic personal names on pots at Manching in southern Germany, and on a sword at Port in western Switzerland.

但有确凿的证据表明，另一种被称为凯尔特伊比利亚语的凯尔特语曾在西班牙中部东北部书写。事实上，在公元前最后两个世纪，发现了85处铭文和50枚硬币上的铭文。虽然其中并没有太多确凿的证据证明它们是凯尔特语，^而非其他相关的印欧语系，但确实出现了一个颇具气势的名字——“迪沃里克斯”（Divorix），意为“神圣之王”，与尤利乌斯·凯撒早期的对手“杜姆诺里克斯”（Dumnorix，意为“世界之王”）类似。然而，他们的出现时间和地点都符合凯尔特伊比利亚人的特征，而且在古代世界，这些人是凯尔特人也是一种公认的事实：公元1世纪出生于当地首府比尔比利斯的诗人马提亚尔就喜欢声称自己拥有凯尔特人和伊比利亚人的血统。 ²⁴

But there is hard evidence of another Celtic language, known as Celtiberian, being written in the north-east of central Spain. There are in fact eighty-five inscriptions, and fifty legends on coins, from the last two centuries BC. There is not much in these that incontrovertibly proves them Celtic,^* rather than some other related strain of Indo-European, though the suitably grandiloquent name Divorix does appear: ‘Divine-King’, comparable with Julius Caesar’s early adversary Dumnorix, ‘World-King’. But they are in the right time and place to be Celtiberians, and it was an accepted truth in the ancient world that these people were Celts: Martial, a first-century AD poet born in the local capital of Bilbilis, liked to claim ancestry from Celts and Iberians.²⁴

然而，到了公元 50 年，高卢人，甚至因苏布里人和凯尔特伊比利亚人，似乎在很大程度上失去了他们的识字地位，即使在他们的中心地带也是如此。

However, by AD 50 Gaulish, and indeed Insubrian and Celtiberian, appear largely to have lost their literate status, even in their heartland areas.

高卢语是如何传播的

How Gaulish spread

那么，这些语言是如何传播到欧洲遥远地区并最终被使用的呢？凯尔特语在欧洲的传播虽然惊人，但发生在有文字记载的历史之前。推动其传播的力量更多地依赖于推测和直觉，而非观察和推断。但如果我们从高卢文化本身来评价，那么高卢语的成功，或者更确切地说，是使用高卢语的各支系的成功，要归功于他们独特的装备，尤其是马拉的轮式车辆，以及铁匠们精湛的技艺，特别是为战士打造的剑、头盔和环甲等铁器。

How, then, did these languages reach the far parts of Europe where they were spoken? The spread of Celtic across Europe, phenomenal as it was, happened before recorded history. The forces that drove it are a matter for speculation and intuition, rather than for observation and inference. But if we take the culture at its own evaluation, Gaulish owed its success, or rather the success of the lineages that spoke it, to their distinctive equipment, notably wheeled vehicles drawn by horses, and to the magnificent products of their smiths, especially ironwork for warriors’ swords, helmets and ring-mail armour.

语言学上的注释证实了这一点。希腊语（sidēron）、拉丁语（ferrum）和凯尔特语（isarno-）†中表示“铁”的词源各不相同，但日耳曼语中的这个词（例如哥特语eisarn，古英语īsern，īren）似乎是从凯尔特语借用的。25^这并不奇怪，因为凯尔特人显然是将炼铁技术传播到北欧的中间人。（塔西佗甚至在《日耳曼尼亚志》（ 43）中提到，高卢部落科蒂尼人向日耳曼夸迪人进贡铁矿石。他还补充道：“quo magis pudeat——他们真是丢脸”，他们本应该利用这些铁来扭转局势。）^*

A linguistic note confirms this. The words for ‘iron’ in Greek (sidēron), Latin (ferrum) and Celtic (isarno-)† have separate origins, but the Germanic word (e.g. Gothic eisarn. Old English īsern, īren) appears to have been borrowed from Celtic.²⁵ This is unsurprising, since the Celts were evidently the middlemen for the transmission of ironworking to the north of Europe. (Tacitus even mentions (Germania, xliii) that the Cotini, a Gaulish tribe, paid tribute to the German Quadi in iron ore. He adds typically, ’quo magis pudeat—the more shame to them’: they should have been able to use the iron to turn the tables.)^*

† 记录于法国汝拉山脉一个古老村庄的高卢语名称Isarnodori, ferrei ostii，意为“铁门”。格林 (1876 年，第一卷，第四章：5)。

† Recorded in the Gaulish name of an old village in the French Jura, Isarnodori, ferrei ostii, ‘iron door’. Grimm (1876, vol. I, ch. 4: 5).

尽管技术水平很高，但其军事应用往往更注重依靠这些声望产品来巩固个别领袖的个人能力，而非发展压倒性的大规模组织。他们的社群规模仍然很小，甚至没有封建领主和国王的结构。识字并非必要，而且人们也大多避免使用。或许，就像两千年后他们的一些后裔在世界的另一端所做的那样，他们能够依靠先进的武器，在寡不敌众的情况下取得胜利，而无需费力去智取对手。

Although the technical level was high, then, its military application tended to emphasise individual leaders’ prowess, sustained by these prestige products, rather than the development of overwhelming large-scale organisation. Their communities remained small, without even a feudal structure of overlords and kings. Literacy was unnecessary, and largely avoided. Perhaps, as some of their descendants would do two thousand years later on the other side of the world, they had been able to rely on their superior weapons, and prevail against vast odds without troubling to outwit their opponents.

尽管凯尔特战士及其村落遍布各地，但他们并未消灭或吞并沿途的社群。（这一点与罗马和平时期及其拉丁语的传播形成了鲜明对比。）仅举几例我们仍能找到其语言痕迹的古代社群为例，凯尔特语使用者与阿尔卑斯山以北的日耳曼人、阿尔卑斯山以南的威尼托人和伊特鲁里亚人、高卢南部的巴斯克人（阿基坦人）、西班牙的伊比利亚人和塔尔特索斯人以及巴尔干半岛的马其顿人和色雷斯人共存。这种文化骚扰并排挤邻邦，但并未征服或同化它们。

Although Celtic warriors and their villages became widespread, they did not eliminate or submerge the communities in their path. (In this, they contrast markedly with the spread of the Pax Romana, and of Latin with it.) To mention only the ancient communities of whose language we can find some trace, Celtic speakers are found in coexistence with Germans north of the Alps, with Veneti and Etruscans south of them, with Basque speakers (Aquitani) in southern Gaul, with Iberians and Tartessians in Spain, and with Macedonians and Thracians in the Balkans. This was a culture that harried its neighbours and thrust them aside, but did not subjugate or incorporate them.

但除了劫掠和军事征服新土地之外，凯尔特语的传播，乃至发展成新的独立语言，或许还有另一条途径，那就是航海。

But besides the raid, and military conquest of new land, there was perhaps one other channel through which the Celtic languages spread, and indeed developed into new and separate languages. This was navigation.

中世纪欧洲普遍接受的说法是，爱尔兰的居民来自西班牙海岸。通常引用的论据是地理和词源上的双重错误。重建的波廷格地图显示，爱尔兰是布里甘提亚（拉科鲁尼亚）附近的一个岛屿，而圣伊西多尔六世纪颇具影响力的著作《词源学》中写道：“希伯尼亚……从非洲向北延伸。它的前端面向希伯利亚和坎塔布里亚海（即比斯开湾）。因此它也被称为希伯尼亚。” ²⁶

It was an accepted tradition of medieval Europe that Ireland had been populated from the coast of Spain. The usual grounds quoted are twin mistakes about geography and etymology. The reconstructed Tabula Peutingeriana shows Ireland as an island offshore from Brigantia (La Coruña), and St Isidore’s influential sixth-century Etymologiae states: ‘Hibernia…extends north from Africa. Its forward parts face (H)iberia and the Cantabric Ocean [viz. the Bay of Biscay]. Whence too it is called Hibernia.’²⁶

然而，这种联系可能远不止于此。公元前四世纪，阿维努斯收集沿海航行信息时，在谈到“圣岛”时写道：“希尔尼人广泛居住于此。阿尔比奥内斯人的岛屿也近在咫尺，塔尔特索斯人习惯于将贸易活动延伸至厄斯特里姆尼德斯河的尽头。迦太基的公民以及赫拉克勒斯之柱周围的平民百姓也经常前往这些海域。” ²⁷

However, there may have been a lot more to this link. Avienus, gathering coastal navigation information in the fourth century, says, of the ‘Holy Island’: ‘the race of the Hierni inhabits it far and wide. Again the island of the Albiones lies near, and the Tartessians were accustomed to carry business to the end of the Oestrymnides. Citizens of Carthage too and the common folk round the Pillars of Hercules went to these seas.’²⁷

“lernē”是希腊语中爱尔兰的常用词，而“Oestrymnides”很可能指的是锡利群岛或康沃尔郡，因为他还提到这些岛屿“富含锡和铅矿”。 ²⁸整段文字都证明了不列颠群岛与伊比利亚半岛南部的塔尔特索斯地区之间存在联系，而塔尔特索斯正是迦太基贸易帝国的中心。

Now lernē was the common Greek term for Ireland, and the Oestrymnides are probably the Scillies, or Cornwall, since he also notes that these islands are ‘rich in mine of tin and lead’.²⁸ The whole passage is evidence for a link between the British Isles and the southern Iberian region of Tartessus, known to be a focus of Carthage’s trade empire.

考古证据充分证实了这一联系。巴里·坎利夫（Barry Cunliffe）注意到，在公元前1200年至公元前200年的青铜时代晚期，欧洲面向大西洋的各个地区（包括爱尔兰、威尔士、康沃尔、布列塔尼、加利西亚和葡萄牙）之间存在着大量交流关系，由此提出“大西洋凯尔特语”可能在东海岸的各个社群中发展成为通用语，或者是一种精英语言。 ²⁹

This link is amply confirmed by archaeological evidence. Impressed by the apparent profusion of exchange relations among the different Atlantic-facing sectors of the European coast, including Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, Galicia and Portugal in the late Bronze Age, 1200-200 BC, Barry Cunliffe has suggested that ‘Atlantic Celtic’ may have grown up as a lingua franca, or perhaps an elite language, among the various communities on the eastern seaboard.²⁹

尽管这一假说源于考古学，但它从语言学和文化角度来看也颇具吸引力。它为凯尔特语向比利牛斯山脉南侧的传播提供了一种解释，因为历史上并没有北方入侵的记载，而且高卢南部和西班牙中部之间的大部分地区实际上一直由巴斯克人占据。它为古爱尔兰文学中一个经久不衰的主题——伊姆拉玛（immrama，讲述奇幻旅程的故事，例如圣布伦丹的故事）——提供了历史依据。此外，它还解释了凯尔特语历史语言学中一个令人困惑的事实：凯尔特伊比利亚语与爱尔兰和苏格兰西部盖尔语系语言之间的方言相似性。

This hypothesis, though archaeologically inspired, has a certain attraction from the linguistic and cultural point of view. It gives a medium for the spread of Celtic across to the southern side of the Pyrenees, when there is no tradition of invasion from the north, and most of the intervening territory between southern Gaul and central Spain was in fact always held by Basques. It gives a basis in history to a persistent theme of old Irish literature, the immrama, tales of magical voyages, such as that of St Brendan. And it provides an explanation for a niggling fact of Celtic historical linguistics: the dialectal similarity between Celtiberian and the Goidelic languages of Ireland and western Scotland.

虽然莱蓬特语、高卢语和布立吞语（P-凯尔特语）通常都将古老的kw转换^为p，但凯尔特伊比利亚语和盖尔语（Q-凯尔特语）保留了k元素。因此，Q-凯尔特语可能是其原始形式，由铁器的有效使用者传播到高卢海岸，然后通过建立交换关系和贸易，向南和向北跨越海洋传播。随后，高卢和阿尔卑斯山的凯尔特人创新性地将kw转换为p ，^不列颠的近亲也效仿了这一做法，而边缘地区的凯尔特伊比利亚语和盖尔语则保留了kw，北方的凯尔特人使用^Iernē，后来将其简化为k。 ^*

While Lepontic, Gaulish and Brythonic (P-Celtic) all usually convert old k^w to p, Celtiberian and Goidelic (Q-Celtic) retain the k element. It would be possible, then, to see Q-Celtic as the original form, spread to the shores of Gaul by effective users of iron, and then, through the establishment of exchange relationships and trade, beyond to the south and north across the sea. Subsequently, the Celts in Gaul and the Alps innovated in converting k^w to p, followed by their close associates in Britain, while the peripheral ones, Celtiberian and Goidelic, retained the k^w, those in the north, Iernē, later simplifying it to k. ^*

^事实上，如今很少有语言学家将P/Q标准视为强有力的区分依据。这种变化可能发生在任何地方：现代罗马尼亚语中确实发生了这种变化，意大利语方言中也独立地发生了这种变化（例如，奥斯坎语变成了P，而拉丁语则没有）。即使在P方言的中心地带，也并非所有Q都变成了P：在罗讷河谷的科利尼历中，我们发现了EQVOS、EQVI、“马”（尽管高卢语中通常的马女神名称是埃波娜），而居住在高卢北部塞纳河畔的塞夸尼人似乎并未受到影响。但是，P-凯尔特语和Q-凯尔特语在传统中是如此根深蒂固，以至于将其排除在讨论之外似乎有误导性。

^* In fact, few linguists today take this P/Q criterion as a very strong discriminant. The change could happen anywhere: indeed it has, in modern Romanian, and quite independently in the Italic dialects (e.g. Oscan changed to P, Latin didn’t). And even in the centre of the P-dialects, not all Qs changed to P: on the Coligny calendar in the Rhône valley we find EQVOS, EQVI, ‘horse’ (even though the usual Gaulish name for the horse goddess is Epona), and the ‘Sequani’, living on the river ‘Sequana’ (Seine) in northern Gaul, seem unaffected. But P-Celtic and Q-Celtic are such a chestnut in the tradition that it seems deceptive to leave it out of the discussion.

事实上，凯尔特语在不列颠群岛经历了一些独特的演变，这在其他任何地方都未曾出现：动词-主语-宾语成为基本的词序，首辅音发生变异，介词发生变位，出现了一些表达身份和活动的特殊表达方式（例如“我在读书”、“我在看书”），等等。有人认为，这些奇特的语言特征实际上继承自当地居民早已失传的语言，或许是建造巨石纪念碑的文明所使用的语言。由于未能完全掌握新语言，他们只是保留了旧语言的许多特征。这就是底层语言假说；虽然有趣，但由于我们对凯尔特语之前的不列颠群岛语言一无所知，因此它解释力有限。

In fact, some strange changes came over Celtic in the British Isles, as nowhere else: verb-subject-object as basic word order, mutation of initial consonants, conjugated prepositions, strange locutions to express status and activity (’I am in my student’, ‘I am at reading of my book’), and much else. There are those who believe that these strangenesses are really inherited from the lost previous languages of the old inhabitants, perhaps spoken by the civilisations that raised megalithic monuments. Failing to learn the incoming language fully, they simply continued with many features of their old languages. This is the substrate hypothesis; interesting, but it explains little since we know nothing of the languages of the British Isles prior to Celtic.

另一种假设是语言混合，或者说克里奥尔化。这一假设也可以纳入凯尔特语沿大西洋沿岸航行传播的理论中，因为在公元前第一个千年的大部分时间里，这一网络中的主要伙伴是腓尼基人，其中许多人（特别是迦太基人）居住在北非，并且完全有能力与整个地中海沿岸保持联系。恰好在北非的埃及语系、闪米特语系和柏柏尔语系中，至少有十七种语言特征与英国和爱尔兰凯尔特语的这些奇特特征直接对应，这些特征在任何印欧语系语言中都极为罕见，更不用说它们的凯尔特语近亲了，而且在全球范围内也极其罕见。 ³⁰如果凯尔特语确实是作为沿海通用语传播的，那么这些北非人在贸易和交流中就会成为凯尔特语使用者，并有效地塑造了这种语言。

Another hypothesis is language mixing, or creolisation. It too can be brought into the theory of Celtic spread by navigation along the Atlantic coast, by noting that major partners in this network, for most of the first millennium BC, were the Phoenicians, many of them (specifically the Carthaginians) based in North Africa, and quite capable of maintaining links along the whole Mediterranean. Now it so happens that in the North African language families, Egyptian, Semitic and Berber, there are direct parallels for at least seventeen of these curious characteristics of British and Irish Celtic, characteristics that are quite unparalleled in any Indo-European language, let alone their Celtic cousins, and which are indeed extremely rare globally.³⁰ If Celtic was indeed spread as a coastal lingua franca, these North Africans, in trade and exchange, would have been among its speakers, and effective in moulding it.

但目前尚无直接的语言学证据支持上述任何观点：高卢语在欧洲大部分地区的传播、凯尔特伊比利亚语的起源以及不列颠群岛的凯尔特语，都只能依靠推测和重构。相比之下，我们有直接的证据表明凯尔特语使用者出现在意大利和东地中海地区。

But there is no direct linguistic evidence for any of this at the moment: as to the spread of Gaulish across most of Europe, and the origins of Celtiberian, and the Celtic languages of the British Isles, we are in the realm of speculation and reconstruction. By contrast, we have direct testimony on the advent of Celtic speakers in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean.

历史记载中高卢人的征战

The Gauls’ advances in the historic record

显然，由年轻男子组成的队伍劫掠以求荣耀和战利品的劫掠理想，在保持独立的凯尔特社会中从未消逝。成功的劫掠，尤其是由那些在家中前途渺茫的幼子所为，可能演变为事实上的入侵。我们也能发现凯尔特部落蓄意迁徙以寻求新土地的例子：其中最著名的例子是赫尔维蒂人，他们试图从阿尔卑斯山迁徙到高卢南部，但这一计划在凯撒发动高卢战争之初就被挫败了。

It is clear that the ideal of the raid, whereby parties of young men would seek to cover themselves with glory and booty, never ceased to be current in Celtic societies that remained independent. Successful raids, especially if perpetrated by younger sons without prospects at home, could turn into de facto invasions. And we also encounter examples of deliberate decisions by Celtic tribes to seek new land in a mass migration: a famous one is the tribe of the Helvetii, whose intent to move from the Alps into southern Gaul was frustrated by Julius Caesar at the beginning of his Gallic Wars.

这类迁徙曾两次导致高卢人大规模入侵希腊罗马文明中心。第一次是公元前390年布伦努斯洗劫罗马，随后几乎立即带着大量战利品和勒索的赎金撤退。波利比乌斯描述了大约在同一时期迁入波河谷的高卢人的特征：

These kinds of movement twice led to major incursions by parties of Gauls into the centres of Graeco-Roman civilisation. The first was the sack of Rome by Brennus in 390 BC, followed almost immediately by a withdrawal with massive booty and extorted payments. Polybius describes the characteristics of the Gauls who moved into the valley of the Po around this time:

他们居住在没有围墙的村落里，对文明的精妙之处一无所知。他们睡在稻草和树叶上，吃肉，除了战争和耕作之外别无他事，生活极其简朴，对任何艺术或科学都一无所知。他们的财产只有牛和金子，因为无论身处何种境地，只有这些东西他们才能随身携带，并能自由迁徙。对他们来说，拥有追随者至关重要，而拥有最多依附者和同伴的人，被认为是部落中最令人畏惧、最有权势的人^。31

They lived in unwalled villages and had no knowledge of the refinements of civilization. As they slept on straw and leaves, ate meat and practised no other pursuits but war and agriculture, their lives were very simple and they were completely unacquainted with any art or science. Their possessions consisted of cattle and gold, since these were the only objects that they could easily take with them whatever their circumstance and transport wherever they chose. It was of the greatest importance to them to have a following, and the man who was believed to have the greatest number of dependants and companions about him was the most feared and powerful member of the tribe.³¹

第二次劫掠是公元前279年由另一位布伦努斯（Brennus）实施的，目标是希腊宗教中心德尔斐。但布伦努斯很快被集结起来的希腊人击退。残余的布伦努斯人留在马其顿地区，沦为流亡的雇佣兵。然而，第二年，一支人数达两万人的队伍（其中一半是妇女和儿童——因此并非一支普通的战帮）应邀渡过马尔马拉海进入安纳托利亚，为比提尼亚国王尼科米德斯（Nicomedes）效力，对抗塞琉古国王安条克。他们表现出色，但之后却成了累赘，直到后来才在安西拉（Ancyra）附近地区定居下来。安西拉成为了这个新定居社群的首府，此后他们被称为加拉太人或高卢希腊人。他们与邻国，特别是帕加马城的战争，以及他们作为雇佣兵的征战（远至埃及）持续了一个世纪之久。

The second was the pillage of Delphi, the Greek religious centre, in 279 BC, carried out by another Brennus, but soon beaten off by the rallying Greeks. Remnants remained as roving mercenaries in Macedonia. But one party (numbering twenty thousand, half of them women and children—so not just a war band) was invited next year to cross the Sea of Marmara into Anatolia, to fight on behalf of Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, against the Seleucid king Antiochus. They gave good service, but afterwards became a liability, until they were settled more permanently in the region around Ancyra. This became the capital of this new settled community, henceforth known either as the Galatians or Gallo-Greeks. Their wars with neighbours, especially the city of Pergamum, and their service as mercenaries (as far afield as Egypt), continued for another century.

无论是在意大利北部还是安纳托利亚，最终都是罗马人平息了躁动不安的高卢劫掠者的纷争。

Both in northern Italy and in Anatolia it was the Romans who finally settled the hash of restless Gaulish marauders.

公元前330年至公元前270年间，罗马在亚得里亚海沿岸发动了一系列先发制人的侵略，并在该地区建立了军事殖民地，这为他们赢得了相当大的威望。随后爆发了第一次布匿战争（公元前264-241年），但罗马人击败迦太基人后，又卷土重来。公元前232年至公元前218年，罗马人通过激烈的战斗和在普拉森提亚（皮亚琴察）和克雷莫纳建立由其公民和盟友组成的新殖民地（因此形成了拉丁语使用者的永久聚居区），进一步深入意大利北部腹地。迦太基人再次发动进攻，这一次是直接入侵意大利北部腹地（公元前217年，汉尼拔率领战象入侵）；令人惊讶的是，这次入侵并未动摇罗马在该地区日益增强的统治地位。汉尼拔被消灭后——这场战斗本身就耗时十六年——罗马人再次投入战斗，于公元前196年在科莫战役中击败因苏布里亚人，并在波河谷的博洛尼亚、摩德纳和帕尔马等地建立了更多殖民地，有效地占领了高卢人此前能够组织袭击的区域。博伊人，这个主要的好战部落，被击败并失去了一半的领土。五十年后，波利比乌斯在游历波河谷时写道，“高卢山麓地区”如今只是一个名字：这片土地已经成为意大利的一部分。 ³²

A series of Roman pre-emptive aggressions on the Adriatic coast, and the founding of military colonies in the area, between 330 and 270 BC, gained them considerable respect. The first Punic war then intervened (264-41), but after the Romans had seen off the Carthaginians, they returned to the fray, and from 232 to 218 BC pressed farther into the heart of northern Italy with pitched battles and new colonies of their own citizens and allies (hence permanent pockets of Latin speakers) at Placentia (Piacenza) and Cremona. Once again the Carthaginians interrupted, this time with an invasion right through the heart of northern Italy (Hannibal and his elephants, in 217 BC); amazingly, this had no effect against the strengthening Roman hold on the area. When Hannibal had been eliminated—an ordeal that itself took sixteen years—the Romans proceeded once again to battle, with a victory over the Insubrians at Como in 196, and more colonies in the valley of the Po at Bologna, Modena and Parma, effectively staking out the area where the Gauls had previously been able to organise raids. The Boii, the principal warlike tribe, were defeated and stripped of half their territory. Writing fifty years later of a visit to the valley of the Po, Polybius observed that ‘Gallia Cisalpina’ was now just a name: the place had become a part of Italy.³²

在安纳托利亚，罗马人刚刚征服了意大利的同胞，便开始试图约束独立的加拉太人。公元前189年，一位罗马将军为了支援帕加马（当时帕加马仍饱受加拉太雇佣兵的蹂躏），击败了加拉太的三个组成部落——托利斯托博吉人、特罗克米人和泰克托萨格人，并将其中四万人卖为奴隶。（显然，上个世纪对他们来说十分有利，他们的人口也大幅增长。）但加拉太人的挑衅行为仍在继续，不仅针对帕加马，也针对其他邻国，例如东部的卡帕多西亚和北部的本都。一个世纪后，在国王戴奥塔鲁斯的统治下，由于与野心勃勃的本都国王米特里达梯六世的共同仇恨，他们与罗马结盟。他凭借高超的政治手腕，在凯撒遇刺后的内战期间始终保持着威望，并于公元前40年安然去世。此后，加拉太人桀骜不驯的行径鲜为人知。公元前25年，奥古斯都将加拉太并入一个更大的行政区，囊括了其南部所有省份，从而削弱了残存的凯尔特人身份认同。

In Anatolia, the Romans started to try to bridle the independent Galatians just after they had finished the job on their kinsmen in Italy. In 189 BC a Roman general, as part of a campaign in support of Pergamum (still suffering from Galatian mercenaries), defeated all three constituent tribes, the Tolistobogii, Trocmi and Tectosages, and sold forty thousand of them into slavery. (The previous century had evidently been good to them, and their population had grown massively.) But Galatian provocation continued, not only with Pergamum, but also with other neighbours, Cappadocia to the east, Pontus in the north. A century later, under King Deiotarus, they were allied with Rome, on the strength of a common enmity with the ambitious king of Pontus, Mithradates VI; in a signal feat of political juggling he managed to remain in favour throughout the civil war that followed Caesar’s assassination, and to die in his bed in 40 BC. Thereafter little more is heard of the Galatians’ irrepressible ways, but in 25 BC Augustus made Galatia part of a much larger unit including all the provinces directly to its south, diluting any remaining Celtic identity.

高卢希腊人从未留下任何高卢语的书面痕迹，尽管他们为一些最精美的高卢艺术形象（如帕加马的雕像）提供了灵感；而且他们的名字也相当可靠（例如Tectosages，意为“寻家者”，Deiotarus，意为“神圣的公牛” ^*）。然而，他们的语言特征却留下了些许痕迹：公元四世纪末，以拉丁文圣经译本（即后来的武加大译本）而闻名的圣杰罗姆宣称，他可以用与他年轻时在摩泽尔河畔特里尔附近听到的几乎相同的语言与安西拉的加拉太人交流。但是，对于一种没有书面传统的语言来说，在希腊化的小亚细亚地区存活四百年实在太长了：或许他只是在提及他读过的一些内容。

The Gallo-Greeks never left a trace of written Gaulish, although they provided the inspiration for some of the finest artistic evocations of the Gauls (in statuary at Pergamum); and the evidence of their names is pretty authentic (Tectosages, ‘home-seekers’, Deiotarus, ‘holy bull’.^*) Nevertheless, a memory of their linguistic identity lingered: at the end of the fourth century AD, St Jerome, famous for his Latin translation of the Bible, which became the Vulgate, was declaring that he could communicate with Ancyra’s Galatians in much the same language as he had heard spoken in his youth near Trier, on the Moselle. But four hundred years is an awfully long time for a language without a written tradition to survive in the midst of Hellenised Asia Minor: perhaps he was just alluding to something he had read.

^*也许这是带有希腊口音的高卢语的一瞥：这在高卢语中自然是Deiwo-tarwos，但希腊语已经省略了所有的 [w]。

^* Perhaps this is a glimpse of Gaulish with a Greek accent: the natural Gaulish for this would be Deiwo-tarwos, but Greek had dropped all [w].

这次对小亚细亚的探索，以及它对安西拉周边中部高地语言环境的影响，为我们了解高卢语这类语言的传播方式及其生存条件提供了宝贵的启示。高卢语是一种与特定族群紧密相连的语言。当它的使用者迁徙时，它的领地也会随之转移；如果社群发展壮大，使用者的数量也会随之增加。但如果社群失去了自身的身份认同或独特的习俗，这种语言就会消失。

This venture into Asia Minor, with its linguistic impact on the central highlands round Ancyra, is instructive about the way in which a language like Gaulish could be spread, and the conditions for its survival. It was the language of a lineage. When its speakers moved, its domain would move with them, and if the community grew, so would the number of its speakers. If the community lost its identity, or its distinguishing customs, the language would disappear.

Consilium：罗马帝国的基本原理

Consilium: The rationale of Roman Imperium

Consilium：（a）审议、磋商、共同考虑、建议；（b）经过考虑、决心、决议、措施、计划、目的、意图而作出的结论；（c）进行审议的人，委员会。

Consilium: (a) deliberation, consultation, a considering together, counsel; (b) a conclusion made with consideration, determination, resolution, measure, plan, purpose, intention; (c) the persons who deliberate, a council.

刘易斯和肖特，《拉丁语词典》

Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary

令人惊讶的是，尽管拉丁语在长达四百年的时间里一直是英国的官方语言和通俗语言，但英国的凯尔特语使用者却始终未能受到拉丁语的影响。拉丁语从未成为英国平民的语言。因此，英国在罗马人眼中那句嘲讽的名声最终应验了：“战时不勇，和平时不忠”。 ³³我们不禁要问，征服者的语言为何未能传播开来？

The Celtic speakers in Britain proved surprisingly impervious to Latin in the long term, even if it was the country’s language of officialdom and literacy for four hundred years. Latin never became the language of the common people in Britain. So it was that Britain’s derisory reputation with the Romans was ultimately fulfilled: ‘neither brave in battle nor faithful in peace’.³³ We must ask how this spread of the conqueror’s language could fail to occur.

罗马之路

Mōs Māiōrum—the Roman way

拉丁语的传播基础是罗马帝国（imperium，该词最初意为“命令”，但后来承载了法语“帝国”的所有含义）的政治和军事扩张，这已是公开的秘密。在这一点上，它与凯尔特语不同，但与早期现代英语颇为相似。然而，与英语使用者一样（再次与凯尔特人不同），罗马人在发动战争时很少表现出赤裸裸的侵略性或好战性。此外，这两类帝国缔造者都不愿公开谈论所取得成就的商业和物质利益——这与凯尔特人强调战利品带来的快感截然不同。究竟是什么驱使罗马征服地中海沿岸的每一个国家呢？

It is no secret that the basis for the spread of Latin was the political and military spread of the Roman imperium (a word originally meaning command, but later carrying all the connotations of its French rendering, empire.) In this it was unlike Celtic, but rather like English in its early modern career. But like the speakers of English too (and again unlike the Celts), the Romans were seldom nakedly aggressive or belligerent in motivating their campaigns. There was also, among both sets of empire-builders, an unwillingness to talk openly about the commercial and material benefits of what was achieved—again unlike the Celts with their emphasis on the joys of booty. What really drew Rome out to conquer every country round the Mediterranean?

我们已经看到，早在公元前二世纪，像波利比乌斯这样的希腊人就对罗马人为何能如此迅速地取得胜利，似乎战胜了所有对手感到好奇。尽管他对罗马人的性格做出了一些尖锐的评论（参见“竞争者：希腊和罗马的观点”，第279页），但他并没有接受任何简单易懂的答案。即使有了两千年的后见之明，试图找出罗马人注定要征服整个地中海沿岸的原因，也难免带有特殊论证（或事后合理化）的意味。然而，我们仍然可以发现罗马人的征服方式与其邻国，特别是西欧邻国之间的差异，而这正是本章的重点。

We have seen that very early on (the second century BC) it was a matter of curiosity to Greeks such as Polybius to figure out what made the Romans so speedily victorious, apparently against all comers. Although he made some trenchant remarks about the Roman character (see ‘The contenders: Greek and Roman views’, p. 279), he did not settle for any easy or simple answer. And even with the benefit of two thousand years’ hindsight, it smacks of special pleading (or ex post facto rationalisation) to detect reasons why it had to be just this village halfway down the Mediterranean’s central peninsula which was bound to take over the whole circuit of its coasts. Nevertheless, it is possible to see differences between the Romans’ way and that of their neighbours, especially those in western Europe, which are our special interest in this chapter.

罗马人是一个高度重视公民社会的民族，他们极其厌恶一人长期独裁。他们的政府体制将权力制衡发挥到了前所未有的高度。公元前510年，即传统上认为的罗马共和国（ Res Publica，拉丁语，意为“人民的财产”）建立之年，他们开始组织年度选举，选出国家主要官员。每位官员都与一位或多位同僚共同执政，分享权力。两位最高行政长官，即执政官，实际上在一年内共同行使国王权力；但他们的权力只有在城外征战时才是绝对的；否则，所有决策，如同其他官员的决策一样，都必须接受罗马人民的挑战（prōvocātio ）。（执政官的联合执政制度甚至导致他们轮流担任最高统帅，这在危机时期可能会造成军事混乱。）唯一长期存在的行政机构是元老院，即由约三百名成员组成的“长老”议会，他们大多是曾担任过官职的男性。元老院负责制定税收标准。自建国以来，元老院一直由那些掌管政府的古老家族把持。尽管如此，偶尔也会有一些有才华（且具备必要条件^* ）的“新人”（novus homō ）有机会跻身元老院之列。

The Romans were an intensely civic society, with an overriding and persistent aversion to long-term dominion by a single man. Their system of government took checks and balances to heights unequalled before or since. From 510 BC, the traditional date of the foundation of their Res Publica (this Latin term for their constitution, the basis for our word republic, means simply ‘the people’s property’ ), they had organised annual elections for the main offices of state, and each holder was matched with one or more colleagues with whom he must share his power. The two holders of the supreme executive office, called consuls, were each in effect joint king for the year; but their power was only absolute when on campaign outside the city; otherwise every decision, like those of all the office-holders, was subject to prōvocātio ( ‘challenge’ ), i.e. appeal to the Roman people. (The joint nature of consulship even led to their assuming the post of commander-in-chief on alternate days, which could cause military chaos at times of crisis.) The only persistent executive institution was the Senātus, the council of ‘elders’, usually about three hundred strong, made up mostly of men who had previously held office. They were responsible for setting the level of taxes. The Senate was always dominated by the old families that had taken responsibility for government since the beginning. Nevertheless, there was room for the occasional novus homō (’new man’) of talent (and the necessary means^*) to break into the ranks from time to time.

担任最高两官——执政官和裁判官——的官员，在其任期结束后，可能会被授予海外总督的职位，以“代表执政官”（prō cōnsule ）或“代表裁判官” （prō praetōre）的身份行使权力，任期可达数年。这些官员承担了罗马的许多对外战争。在国家紧急状态下，执政官制度可以暂停六个月，并任命一名（独裁官）。尽管从公元前二世纪后期开始，执政官制度就一直存在问题，一些权力过大的将领不愿接受制度对他们的限制，但在罗马扩张其海外帝国的过程中，这些机构基本都能正常运作。到公元前44年，罗马的海外帝国已基本完成扩张，尤利乌斯·凯撒被任命为终身独裁官，随后遭到刺杀，导致罗马共和国的覆灭。所有制度又延续了五百年，但此后它们始终由一位被称为“君主”（Princēps）的统治者掌控，这位统治者终身在位（尽管其统治往往残酷或仁慈地短暂）。“国王”（ rēx ）一词仍然被避免使用，这一禁忌自公元前510年起便一直延续至今，但事实上，罗马已经恢复了君主制，无论它多么擅长掩饰。

Holders of the top two offices, consuls and praetors, might expect an overseas governorship, to exercise authority prō cōnsule, ‘on behalf of the consul’, or prō praetōre, ‘on behalf of the praetor’, for a period of years after their term of office ended. These officers undertook many of Rome’s foreign wars. In time of national emergency, the consular system could be suspended for six months at a time, and a (single) dictator appointed. Although there were persistent problems from the later second century BC onwards, with over-mighty generals unwilling to accept the limits the system placed on them, these institutions were all more or less functioning during the acquisition of Rome’s foreign empire, which was largely complete by 44 BC, when Julius Caesar was made dictator for life, and then assassinated, leading to the downfall of the Republic. All the institutions continued to exist for another five hundred years, but henceforth they were always dominated by a Princēps, ‘top man’, as the emperor was called, who ruled for life (though this was often cruelly, or mercifully, brief). The term rēx, ‘king’, was still avoided, a taboo surviving from 510 BC, but Rome had in fact returned to being a monarchy, however skilled it might be at dissembling.

^*参议员至少需要达到骑士阶层，其资格（土地财产）设定为 400,000 塞斯特斯。根据刘易斯和肖特拉丁语词典1879 年的估价，并应用此后的通货膨胀率，这相当于现在（2003 年）的 186,000 欧元或 315,000 美元。

^* Senators needed to be at least of equestrian rank, for which the qualification (in landed property) was set at 400,000 sestertii. Taking the 1879 valuation in Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary, and applying inflation rates since, this would equate to a present (2003) value of €186,000 or $315,000.

这显然是一套非常精密的体系，其运作离不开根深蒂固的传统和法律尊重。它为不断扩张的城邦提供了一个框架，使其能够有序地进行自我治理，同时将军队这一有组织的武力控制权牢牢掌握在既得利益阶级手中。罗马人更倾向于可预测的原则而非魅力型的领导，随着其影响力的增长（事实上，他们严明的军事组织似乎在大多数冲突中都占据了优势），他们将这种政体模式输出到被征服并征召入伍的城市。罗马公民的福利逐渐扩展到整个扩张的帝国，赋予了新臣民（其中一些人）强烈的忠诚动机。实际上，当时的罗马帝国代表着全球化的益处：良好的通讯、获取世界所能提供的一切资源，以及（通常情况下）免受专制政府和压迫的自由。借用一句罗马人喜爱的格言：ōtium cum dignitāte——和平与尊严，或者（等价地）休闲与价值。

This was evidently a very elaborate system, which could only work because of an ingrained respect for tradition and law. It provided a framework in which an expanding city-state could govern itself in an orderly fashion, while keeping the control of organised force, the army, in the hands of the established classes. The Romans preferred predictable principle to charismatic leadership, and as their influence increased (for in fact their disciplined military organisation seemed to give them the edge in most conflicts) they exported this pattern of government into the cities they conquered and then enlisted. Little by little, the benefits of Roman citizenship were extended throughout the expanding empire, giving the new subjects (some of them) a strong motivation for loyalty. In effect, the Roman empire in its day stood for the benefits of globalisation: good communications, access to all that the world could provide, and freedom (usually) from arbitrary government and oppression. To adopt a favourite Roman phrase: ōtium cum dignitāte—peace with honour, or (equivalently) leisure with good value.

但这种对传统的尊重并未延伸到对拉丁语这种古老语言遗存的特殊尊重。尽管罗马最古老的法典——著名的《十二铜表法》——是用拉丁文写成的，但不知何故，直到共和国末期，都没有权威版本流传下来。罗马人对自己的语言缺乏情感；即使是他们最接近圣经的著作——在危难之际寻求指引的《西比尔预言书》，也不是用拉丁文写成的，而是用希腊六音步诗体写成的。

But this respect for tradition did not extend to a particular respect for the older remnants of their language, Latin. Although the Romans’ most ancient code of laws, the famous Twelve Tables, was written in Latin, somehow no authoritative version of them survived until the end of the Republic. The Romans were unsentimental about their own language; even their closest equivalent to Holy Writ, the Sibylline Books, consulted for guidance in time of trouble, were not written in Latin, but Greek hexameter verse.

拉丁语是他们从小就熟悉的语言；在与外国人交往时，使用拉丁语很实用，因为罗马共和国的稳固基础意味着在谈判中，外国人几乎总是处于被动地位。希腊语则打破了这种偏好，因为随着罗马人对意大利乃至更广阔世界的认知不断加深，他们发现希腊殖民地遍布各地，开展商业活动，并普遍展现出一种自信的态度，这种自信源于其高度发达的文化以及与东地中海母城（“母城”）的紧密联系。当罗马人发现希腊文化发展到了前所未有的高度时，他们（起初）乐于使用希腊语进行学术研究，而不是费力地去发展拉丁语以与之竞争。已知最早的罗马文学作品，即法比乌斯·皮克托的《罗马史》（公元前三世纪末），就是用希腊语写成的。尽管早期曾有人尝试建立一种更具罗马传统的文学传统，例如利维乌斯·安德罗尼库斯和奈维乌斯用萨图尔尼格律创作拉丁史诗，但他们的努力最终失败了。此后，几乎所有的拉丁作品都严格仿照希腊原作。

Latin was simply the language that they had grown up with; when dealing with foreigners, it was practical to use it, since the solid base of the Roman Republic meant that in negotiations foreigners were almost always in the suppliant position. The Greek language created an exception to this preference, since, as the Romans expanded their knowledge of Italy and the world beyond its shores, they discovered Greek colonies everywhere, doing business, and generally projecting a self-confident attitude, derived from an aggressively literate culture, and links with their métropóleis (’mother cities’) back in the eastern Mediterranean. And as the Romans discovered the undreamtof heights to which Greek culture had been developed, they were happy (at first) to use the Greek language for their own intellectual work rather than undertake the onerous task of trying to build up Latin to compete with it. The first known literary production by a Roman, Fabius Pictor’s history of Rome (late third century BC), was in Greek. Although there was an attempt early on to establish a literary tradition that was more traditionally Roman, with Livius Andronicus and Naevius writing their Latin epics in Saturnian metre, they failed to carry the day. Henceforth almost all Latin works were closely modelled on Greek originals.

希腊文化的一个方面在罗马引起了强烈的共鸣。那就是对修辞的尊重，罗马人称之为“ars ōrātōria”，即说服的技巧。在这些城邦（包括希腊和罗马城邦）中，说服的技巧与战斗和军事指挥同等重要，因为决策几乎总是由公民大会而非个人做出。演说训练成为罗马高等教育的核心，学生们撰写辩论稿（contrōversiae）和政策演说（suāsōriae），其方式与今天撰写论文的方式类似；这种影响对拉丁文风格的影响是深远的，即使在自由制度衰落后仍然持续存在。即使是爱情诗，用拉丁语写出来也常常显得有些说教，其中一种常用的技巧是面向假想的听众。诗歌和演说被视为非常相似的游戏：公元二世纪，高卢著名律师马库斯·阿佩尔（又名“马克·霍格”）指出，通过诗歌成名比通过演说成名要难得多，尤其是在行省地区^。34

One aspect of Greek culture found an immediate resonance in Rome. This was the respect for rhetoric, what the Romans called ars ōrātōria, the skills of persuasion, which were just as important as those of fighting and military command in these city-states (both Greek and Roman), where decisions were almost always taken by assemblies, not individuals. Training in oratory became the core of Roman higher education, students working up debates (contrōversiae) and policy speeches (suāsōriae) in the way in which nowadays they turn out essays; and the effect on Latin style was pervasive, lasting long after the decline of free institutions. Even love poetry can sound rather hectoring in Latin, a favourite trick being to turn to an imaginary audience. And poems and speeches were seen as very much the same game: in the second century AD Marcus Aper (’Mark Hogg’), a noted advocate from Gaul, was pointing out how much harder it was to get a name for oneself through poetry than through oratory, especially in the provinces.³⁴

拉丁语在罗马帝国境内的传播，不仅得益于军队，军队最初由公民组成，但后来越来越多地从各地征召男子入伍；也得益于罗马人普遍推行的政策，即在士兵退役后授予他们土地定居。（我们已经提到过军队在使早期诗人之一恩尼乌斯（Ennius）——他原本是奥斯坎语使用者——拉丁化方面所发挥的作用；以及战略位置优越的殖民地最终如何将山南高卢变成意大利的一部分。）这在东地中海地区从未产生过重大影响，因为通用语希腊语在那里根深蒂固，难以撼动。但在高卢和伊比利亚半岛，罗马殖民地似乎最终导致了当地凯尔特语的衰落，并最终被拉丁语所取代。

Latin was spread round the empire not least by the army, originally made up of citizens but into which increasingly men were enlisted from all over, and also by the common Roman policy of granting soldiers land on which to settle after their discharge. (We have already noted the role played by the army in Latinising one of their earliest poets, Ennius, originally an Oscan speaker; and how strategically placed colonies ultimately converted Cisalpine Gaul into just another part of Italy.) This never had a major effect in the eastern Mediterranean, where the lingua franca, Greek, was just too well established ever to be shaken. But in Gaul and Iberia the Roman colonies seem to have led to the eventual decline and replacement of their Celtic languages by Latin.

高卢人的背叛

The desertion of Gaulish

罗马征服高卢一百年后，高卢语铭文全部消失，但零星的轶事表明，这种口语又延续了两百多年。公元二世纪，圣伊里奈乌斯从亚细亚西迁至卢格杜努姆（里昂）担任主教，他记载自己抵达那里后不得不学习一种“野蛮的语言”。 ³⁵三世纪，伟大的法学家乌尔比安指出，某些宣誓声明可以用高卢语作出。 ³⁶随后，在三世纪末，历史学家兰普里迪乌斯提到，一位德鲁伊女祭司曾用高卢语预言亚历山大·塞维鲁（公元222-235年在位）的死亡。在苏尔皮基乌斯·塞维鲁（公元363-425年）的一篇对话录中，一位拉丁语不流利的高卢人被告知：“用凯尔特语和我们说话，或者如果你愿意，就用高卢语。”甚至到了五世纪，西多尼乌斯·阿波利纳里斯³⁷宣称，高卢中南部的一个部落阿尔韦尔尼的贵族们最近才学会了拉丁语，并摆脱了“粗糙的高卢语”（sermōnis Gallicī squāmam）。

Inscriptions in Gaulish had all died out a hundred years after the Roman conquest, although there are scattered anecdotes indicating some survival of the spoken language for a couple of hundred more years. In the second century St Irenaeus, who came west from Asia Minor to take up a bishopric in Lugdunum (Lyons), reports having to learn ‘a barbarous tongue’ when he arrived there.³⁵ In the third century, the great lawyer Ulpian stated that certain sworn statements could be made in Gaulish.³⁶ Then, towards the end of that century, the historian Lampridius mentions that a Druidess had used Gaulish to foretell the death of Alexander Severus (who reigned 222-35). And in a dialogue of Sulpicius Severus (363-425), a Gaul who does not speak Latin well is told: ‘speak to us in Celtic, or if you prefer, in Gaulish’. And even in the fifth century, Sidonius Apollinaris³⁷ declares that the nobility of the Arverni, a tribe in central southern Gaul, had just recently learnt Latin and cast off the ‘rough scales of Gaulish speech’ (sermōnis Gallicī squāmam).

但从这些语言的后裔（令人遗憾的是，它们根本没有后代）来看，高卢语和凯尔特伊比利亚语显然是随着罗马的征服和拉丁语的引入而消亡的。尽管卢奇安曾提到高卢人对雄辩的推崇，但古典文化对凯尔特语言传统的价值却没有任何积极的评价，最终任其衰落。

But from the evidence of the languages’ progeny (the sorry fact that they had none), it is clear that Gaulish and Celtiberian were effectively finished by the Roman takeover, and its introduction of Latin. Despite the Gaulish respect for eloquence noted by Lucian, Classical culture had nothing positive to say about the value of the Celtic language traditions, and they were allowed to lapse.

如此彻底的遗失令人惊讶，因为五百多年后，爱尔兰语和威尔士语中记录了大量神话，重述了诸如银手努阿达（高卢语：Nodens）、长臂卢格（或称巧手卢格，高卢语： Lugus）、至高布里吉德（高卢语： Brigindona或Brigantia ）、铁匠戈伊布尼乌（高卢语：Goibhniu 或 Gofannon ）、伟大的女王莫里根（高卢语：Rigantona），以及奥格玛（高卢语： Ogmios）等神祇的冒险故事；现存的图像资料（例如在贡德斯特鲁普发现的精美大锅上的图案）表明，其他神祇，例如长角的凯尔努诺斯，也拥有复杂的神话传说。这表明，如果高卢人有意愿，他们一定有很多引人入胜且鲜为人知的故事可以讲述。

This total loss is surprising, since five hundred and more years later so many myths were written down in Irish and Welsh, retelling the adventures of gods such as Nuada of the Silver Hand (Gaulish Nodens), Lugh of the Long Arm—or Lieu Skilful Hand—(Lugus), Brigid the High (Brigindona or Brigantia), Goibhniu or Gofannon the Smith (Gobannio), Morrigan or Rhiannon the Great Queen (Rigantona), and not forgetting Ogma (Ogmios) himself; and surviving iconography (for example, on the magnificent cauldron found at Gundestrup) shows that other gods, such as the horned Cernunnos, had complicated myths. This demonstrates that there must have been a wealth of fascinating and unfamiliar subject matter that the Gauls could have retold if they had had the will.

这种损失并非不可避免，因为拉丁语在吸收希腊语的过程中所经历的转变表明，一种古代语言完全有可能在不被颠覆的情况下吸收另一种文化；^*而希腊语在东方的存续本身也表明，即使面对一个自信的传统，拉丁语也并非不可战胜。但据我们所知，高卢人和凯尔特伊比利亚人都没有试图用他们自己的凯尔特方式来重塑罗马文化。相反，他们似乎欣然接受了新的罗马和拉丁语文化，因为正是古代西欧讲凯尔特语的地区，如今拥有了源自拉丁语的语言：法语、奥克语、西班牙语、加泰罗尼亚语、葡萄牙语，以及其他一些源自拉丁语的小语种。当我们把罗马社会的性质与高卢人和凯尔特伊比利亚人之前所熟悉的社会进行对比时，这一点就显得更加令人惊讶了。一个公民化的、中央集权的城市社会取代了过去较为分散、有时流动性更强的乡村生活。显然，对凯尔特人来说，这感觉就像是进步。罗马人一定赢得了年轻一代的忠诚，因为高卢最后一次独立战争的组织者维钦托列从未被奉为英雄（直到1900年后拿破仑三世才开始效仿他），而且在罗马征服高卢之后的一代人中，只发生了几起叛乱，而且都很快被镇压了。高卢在凯撒的闪电战中仅用了八年就沦陷了。相比之下，罗马花了近两个世纪才完全控制了西班牙（从公元前206年驱逐迦太基人到公元前19年奥古斯都的坎塔布里亚战争结束）。然而，西班牙也在同一时期趋于平静，最终接受了“罗马和平”（Pax Romāna）的命运。

The loss was not inevitable, for the transformation that Latin had undergone to incorporate prestigious Greek shows that it was quite possible for one ancient language to take on board another’s culture without being capsized;^* and the survival of Greek in the east itself shows that even Latin was not invincible, in the face of a self-confident tradition. But neither Gauls nor Celtiberians made any attempt that we know of to recast Roman culture in their own Celtic terms. Rather, they seem to have adopted the new Roman, and Latin-speaking, ways with alacrity, since it is precisely the areas of western Europe that spoke Celtic in the ancient world which now have Latin-derived languages: French, Occitan, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, as well as a few other smaller languages derived from Latin. This is doubly surprising when we contrast the nature of Roman society with what the Gauls and Celtiberians had previously known. A civic, centralised, urban society replaced the more scattered, and sometimes more mobile, village life of the past. Evidently, for the Celts, it felt like progress. The Romans must have won the loyalty of the rising generation, for Vercingetorix, the organiser of Gaul’s last struggle for independence, was never invoked as a heroic inspiration (until Napoleon III took him up 1900 years later), and there were only a couple of revolts, fairly easily put down, in the generation following the Roman conquest of Gaul. Gaul had fallen to Caesar in a blitzkrieg taking just eight years. By contrast, it had taken Rome almost two centuries to completely establish its control of Spain (from the expulsion of the Carthaginians in 206 to Augustus’s Cantabrian Wars ending in 19 BC). Nevertheless, Spain too quietened down about the same time, and at last accepted as its fate the Pāx Romāna.

^*几乎在同一时期，亚美尼亚语也通过融入波斯语做了同样的事情。

^* And just about the same time, Armenian was doing much the same thing with an infusion of Persian.

巴斯克人和不列颠人中的拉丁语

Latin among the Basques and the Britons

因此，当古代西欧居民被纳入罗马帝国版图时，投降，甚至可能是欣然接受，是大多数人的选择。但我们不妨花些时间，探讨一下两种人们并未选择投降的情况。

Surrender, then, or perhaps even enthusiastic take-up, was the majority option when the inhabitants of ancient western Europe were brought into the Roman empire. But it is worthwhile sparing a moment to consider two cases where this option was not taken.

^{其中之一是巴斯克语，据推测是凯撒时代高卢}西南部阿基坦人（以及伊比利亚半岛的瓦斯科内人）的语言。它挺过了拉丁语的冲击，后者取代了其高卢语和凯尔特伊比利亚语邻居，正如它在过去两千年中经受住了历史的种种考验一样。巴斯克语堪称欧洲语言史上的特例，因为它早于所有印欧语系语言。有记录显示，巴斯克人曾在罗马军队服役（事实上，一群巴斯克人跟随权势滔天的将军马略，使他在公元前86年得以在罗马短暂地实行恐怖统治；另有³⁸名巴斯克人曾在不列颠的哈德良长城服役），但他们的身份认同经受住了罗马统治的挑战。他们借用了表示“橄榄”和“油”（ oliva，olio）以及“雕像”（estatu ）的词语，表明他们接受了罗马生活中某些对他们来说是新的方面，但除此之外，他们并没有受到在罗马帝国生活五百年的影响。

One was Basque, presumably the language of the Aquitanians of southwest Gaul^* (and the Vascones in Iberia) in Caesar’s time, which survived the influx of Latin to replace its Gaulish and Celtiberian neighbours, as it has survived everything else that history has thrown at it in the last two thousand years. It is the special case, par excellence, of European language history, since it pre-dates all the Indo-European languages. There are records of Basques serving in the Roman army (indeed, a group of them travelling with the over-mighty general Marius allowed him to mount a brief reign of terror in Rome in 86 BC;³⁸ others are known to have served on Hadrian’s Wall in Britain), but their identity proved equal to the challenge of Roman rule. They borrowed the words for ‘olive’ and ‘oil’ (oliva, olio), and ‘statue’ (estatu), showing the acceptance of certain aspects of Roman life that had been new to them, but otherwise show no effect from five hundred years of presence in the Roman empire.

更复杂的情况是语言在英国的存续。我们已经从地名证据中看到，在罗马入侵时期，这里曾使用一种与高卢语非常相似的语言，或者说是高卢语的一种方言。人名也印证了这一点：在不列颠人著名的国王和王后的名字中，我们看到了Cassi-vellaunos（“橡树征服者”）、Tascio-vanos（“獾杀手”）、Cuno-belinos（“贝利诺斯神的狗”——莎士比亚的《辛白林》）、Caratacos（“挚爱”）、Boudicca（“维多利亚”——参见爱尔兰语búadach，“凯旋的”）。

The more complicated case is that of language survival in Britain. We have already seen from the evidence of place names that a language either very like Gaulish, or a dialect of it, was spoken here at the time of the Roman invasions. Personal names tell the same story: among the names of noted kings and queens among the Britons we have Cassi-vellaunos (’oak-dominator’), Tascio-vanos (’badger-slayer’), Cuno-belinos (’dog of the god Belinos’—Shakepeare’s Cymbeline), Caratacos (’beloved’), Boudicca (’Victoria’—cf. Irish búadach, ‘triumphant’).

^*阿基塔尼亚铭文中提到的名字似乎有巴斯克词根，例如巴斯克语gizon、“男人”、andere、“女士”、neskato、“女孩”和bihotz、“心”旁边的 Cison、Andere、Nescato 和 Bihoxvs（Gorrochategui 1995：38）。

^* Names mentioned in Aquitanian inscriptions appear to have Basque roots, e.g. Cison, Andere, Nescato and Bihoxvs beside Basque gizon, ‘man’, andere, ‘lady’, neskato, ‘girl’, and bihotz, ‘heart’ (Gorrochategui 1995: 38).

公元43年征服英国并实现全面永久占领后，罗马人有意识地努力在不列颠精英阶层中传播拉丁语，乃至罗马教育。塔西佗对阿格里科拉（公元77年至84年担任不列颠总督，恰巧也是他的岳父）的教育计划进行了辛辣的讽刺评论：

After the conquest of AD 43, which led to full-scale permanent occupation, the Romans made a conscious effort to spread Latin, and indeed Roman education, among the British elite. Tacitus comments cynically on the education plans of Agricola (governor of Britain from 77 to 84 and, as it happened, his father-in-law):

他教导酋长的儿子们学习文科，并表示更偏爱不列颠人的本土智慧而非高卢人的学问，目的是在那些先前完全拒绝罗马语言的人们心中种下雄辩的种子。于是他们开始穿我们的服装，穿上托加长袍。渐渐地，他们被引诱到颓废的生活中，沉溺于柱廊、浴场和时髦的派对。这些天真的人把这称为文明生活[ humānitās ]，而实际上，这却是他们被奴役的一部分^。39

he instructed the sons of the chiefs in liberal arts, and expressed a preference for the native wit of the British over the studies of the Gauls, so as to plant a desire for eloquence in people who had previously rejected the Roman language altogether. So they took to our dress, and wearing the toga. Gradually they were drawn off into decadence, with colonnades and baths and chic parties. That was called a civilized life [humānitās] by these innocents, whereas it was really part of their enslavement.³⁹

具有讽刺意味的是，这些研究是在冬季开始的，此前阿格里科拉最终摧毁了安格尔西岛上的德鲁伊教学习中心，造成了巨大的伤亡。

In a bitter irony, these studies were initiated in the winter after Agrícola had finally obliterated, with much carnage, the centre of Druidical learning on the Isle of Anglesey.

尽管他们最初都使用同一种语言，但从罗马人的一番奇特言论中，我们可以看出，不列颠人在采用拉丁语方面与欧洲大陆的高卢人不相上下，却又略逊一筹。公元二世纪，与塔西佗同时代的尤维纳利斯在讽刺世人疯狂的行径中写道：

Although they had started from the same language, we can detect, from the odd remark made by Romans, that the British were bracketed with, but not quite up to, the continental Gauls in their adoption of Latin. In a satire on the way the world had gone mad, Juvenal (a contemporary of Tacitus in the second century AD) wrote:

如今，全世界都有了自己的希腊和罗马式的雅典；雄辩的高卢人教会了英国人如何辩护，而图勒正在谈论聘请一位演说教师^。40

Today the whole world has its Greek and Roman Athens; the eloquent Gauls have taught the British to be advocates, and Thüle is talking of hiring an oratory teacher.⁴⁰

这里提到的图勒（Thüle），在罗马人看来可能就是北极，表明尤维纳利斯是在用极端的视角思考问题。这体现了罗马统治阶级的傲慢态度，也揭示了古代和近代帝国主义的诸多共通之处：征服者或许会告诉被征服的少数民族，他们唯一的希望在于自我文明化，但当他们试图践行这一愿望时，征服者却绝不会认真对待。

The mention of Thüle here, which as far as the Romans were concerned might have been the North Pole, shows that Juvenal is thinking in terms of extremes. This is the condescension of the Roman establishment, showing much in common between old and more recent imperialisms: the conquerors might well tell subject minorities that their only hope lay in civilising themselves, but would never take them seriously when they tried to make good on this aspiration.

有直接证据表明，拉丁语的传播范围确实超出了正式场合和政府用途。一些带有潦草拉丁文涂鸦的奇特瓷砖在一些遗址中被发现，其中最有趣的是伦敦纽盖特监狱：AVSTALIS DIBVS XIII VAGATUR SIB COTIDIM，意为“格斯已经连续十三天每天都在游荡”，这是古代告密的一个例子。在罗马人在巴斯开发的疗养胜地和度假中心，人们发现了一百多条用粗糙的拉丁文（有时是倒写）书写的仪式诅咒和誓言：DOCIMEDIS PERDIDIT MANICTLIA DVA QVI ILLAS INVOLA VI VT MENTES S VA PERDET OCVLOS S VS IN FANO VBI DESTINA，意为“多西米德斯丢了一副手套。愿偷走手套的人在女神决定的神庙里失去理智和双眼。”

There is direct evidence that Latin did spread beyond formal and government uses. Odd tiles with scribbled Latin graffiti have turned up on sites, most amusingly at Newgate in London: AVSTALIS DIBVS XIII VAGATUR SIB COTIDIM, ‘Gus has been wandering off every day for thirteen days’, an example of ancient whistle-blowing. The waters at the health resort and holiday centre that the Romans developed at Bath have yielded over a hundred ritual curses and oath tokens, written in rough Latin (sometimes backwards): DOCIMEDIS PERDIDIT MANICTLIA DVA QVI ILLAS INVOLA VI VT MENTES S VA PERDET OCVLOS S VS IN FANO VBI DESTINA, ‘Docimedes has lost a pair of gloves. May whoever has made off with them lose his wits and his eyes in the temple where [the goddess] decides.’

威尔士语，这种源自英国本土语言的现代语言，曾与当时通俗拉丁语混用，至今仍保留着六百多个借自英国本土的词汇，其中包括一些日常用语，例如mur, ffenestr, gwydr, cegin, cyllell, ffwrn, sebon, ysbwng（墙、窗、玻璃、厨房、刀、烤箱、肥皂、海绵）以及ceirios, castan, lili, rhos, fioled（樱桃、栗子、百合、玫瑰、紫罗兰）。此外，在法律和基督教等更具学术性的领域，还有更多词汇源自英国本土语言。

And Welsh, that modern descendant of the British language which was being spoken in and among this colloquial Latin, has preserved over six hundred words borrowed from it, including such household terms as mur, ffenestr, gwydr, cegin, cyllell, ffwrn, sebon, ysbwng (wall, window, glass, kitchen, knife, oven, soap, sponge) and ceirios, castan, lili, rhos, fioled (cherry, chestnut, lily, rose, violet). There are many more words in more intellectual domains such as law and Christianity.

现代学者根据这些借词的一些语音特征提出，不列颠使用的拉丁语比罗马帝国其他地区的拉丁语更为保守。 ⁴¹可以推测，这可能表明拉丁语在日常交流中并不普及，而仍然是一种生硬而正式的表达方式。五世纪初在苏格兰边境长大的圣帕特里克抱怨说，他的拉丁语一直很差，因为他十六岁时被爱尔兰劫掠者俘虏，错过了关键的教育时期。显然，即使在他富裕的家庭中，拉丁语也不是日常表达的工具。

In the modern era it has been argued, from some phonetic properties of these borrowings, that Latin as spoken in Britain was more conservative than in other parts of the Roman empire.⁴¹ Conceivably, this could suggest that it was less well established in ordinary currency, remaining instead a stiff and formal means of expression. St Patrick, who grew up on the Scottish borders in the early fifth century, complained that his Latin was always weak, because having been captured by Irish raiders when he was sixteen, he had missed out on the crucial years of education. Evidently Latin was not an everyday means of expression even in his well-to-do family.

但无论此处可能发现了多少真相，我们对书面记录的依赖都扭曲了我们对英国人所扮演角色的认知。英国书面记录的缺失令人颇感意外，至今仍未得到解释。高卢语在欧洲大陆经常被记录下来，但英国语显然没有：在英国，迄今为止只发现了两块罗马时期用拉丁语以外的语言写成的铭文。这两块铭文刻在巴斯水中发现的锡铅板上，似乎使用了类似凯尔特语的语言，但完全无法辨认^。42

But whatever the glimmer of truth that may have been detected here, our reliance on written records distorts our sense of the role that must have gone on being played by British. This absence of written British is quite surprising, and has not been explained. Gaulish was often written down on the Continent, but British was evidently not: in Britain, only two inscriptions from the Roman period in a language other than Latin have ever been discovered. They are two of the inscriptions on tin/lead sheet from the waters of Bath, and seem to be in something like Celtic, but are not decipherable at all.⁴²

罗马征服之后，拉丁语仍然作为学术语言存在：在英国，如同其他地方一样，其地位基本上未受挑战，直到16至18世纪的文艺复兴和启蒙运动，欧洲本土语言才逐渐被接受用于严肃的纪实写作。然而，不知何故，在公元5世纪的某个时期，即罗马撤出不列颠和撒克逊人征服英格兰之间，拉丁语作为英国本土语言逐渐消失。

Latin persisted after the Roman conquest as the language of learning: in Britain, as elsewhere, essentially unchallenged until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries gradually made the use of European vernaculars acceptable for serious factual writing. But somehow, some time in the fifth century, between the Roman withdrawal from Britain and the Saxon conquest of England, it got lost as a language of the British people.

像某些人那样，满足于一些不合理的解释是没有意义的，例如当时城市普遍衰落，这可以从引水渠等公共设施的破败以及帝国在东方入侵前整体的衰落中看出。这种情况或许确实发生过，也可能削弱了不列颠拉丁语最常用的地区。但这并不能区分高卢和不列颠的情况：我们仍然需要解释，为什么只有在不列颠，拉丁语才仍然是城市的通用语言，而不列颠语在乡村地区仍然盛行，而拉丁语却在高卢的大部分地区传播到了各个角落。

There is no point in contenting ourselves, as some have, with non-explanations, such as a general retreat, visible in the period, from the cities, something that is evidenced by a run-down in developed services such as aqueducts, and part of the decline of the empire as a whole before the incursions from the east. This may indeed have happened, and may have weakened the areas in Britain where Latin was most likely to be used. But it does not discriminate between the situation in Gaul and that in Britain: we would still need to explain why only in Britain did Latin remain a language of the cities, leaving British strong in the country, whereas Latin spread to every corner of the land in most of Gaul.

当我们探讨不列颠语本身在如今英格兰大部分地区的演变历程时，我们将再次提及这一点。然而，无论不列颠语在与英语的竞争中多么弱势，都必须记住，不列颠语在这个岛屿上比拉丁语存活的时间更长，即便它从未被视为一种值得书写的语言。在公元5世纪初最后一批罗马驻军撤离不列颠前往意大利保卫家园之后，没有任何罗曼语族语言在不列颠发展壮大的迹象。

We shall return to this when we consider what became of British itself, over most of what is now England. But however weak British turned out to be in competition with English, it must be remembered that British had outlived Latin in this island, even if it had never been seen as a language worth writing down. There is no trace of any Romance language assuming a life of its own in Britain after the departure of the last Roman garrisons from Britain to defend Italy in the early 400s.

事件：日耳曼人和斯拉夫人的进步

Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances

einfallen：（a）坍塌，塌陷；（b）入侵（一个国家）；（c）夜晚降临，冬天来临；（d）光束照射；（e）猎鸟飞入，栖息；（f）加入，加入（一段音乐），打断（一段对话）；（g）突然想到……

einfallen: (a) to collapse, to cave in; (b) in ein Land ~ to invade (a country); (c) (night) to fall, (winter) to set in; (d) (beams of light) to be incident; (e) (game birds) to come in, settle; (f) to join in, come in (on a piece of music), break in (to a conversation); (g) (thought) occur to somebody…

柯林斯德语词典

Collins German Dictionary

einfallen：……拉丁语incidere的借译。

einfallen:… loan translation of Latin incidere.

鲁茨·马肯森的《词源词典》

Reklams Etymologisches Wörterbuch von Lutz Mackensen

日耳曼人的入侵——既势不可挡又毫无成效

The Germanic invasions—irresistible and ineffectual

罗马对不列颠的统治结束得既迅速又果断。西哥特人的首领阿拉里克威胁要入侵意大利。公元401年，身为汪达尔人却担任帝国最高统帅的斯提利科将驻军撤出不列颠，以加强帝国的核心领土。这使得不列颠自身在面对日耳曼人沿其“撒克逊海岸”（即面向欧洲的海岸线）日益频繁的入侵时，几乎毫无防备。公元410年，不列颠人向皇帝请求增援，但皇帝的答复却是命令他们自行防御；更令人匪夷所思的是，他还补充说，征召地方军队不会被视为对罗马的敌对行为。此后，不列颠人便杳无音信。不到一代人的时间，不列颠便再无需要防守的行省。撒克逊人就此定居下来。

The end to the Roman occupation of Britain, when it came, was determinate and sudden. Alaric, leader of the Visigoths, was threatening to invade Italy. In 401 Stilicho, himself a Vandal but the empire’s commander-in-chief, withdrew the garrison from Britain to reinforce the empire’s heartland. This left Britain itself defenceless against the steadily increasing incursions of Germani along its ‘Saxon shore’, the coast facing Europe. In 410 the Britons sent an appeal to the emperor for reinforcement: his reply was to order them to look to their own defence; somewhat surreally he added that the raising of local forces would not be taken as hostility to Rome. That was the last they heard. Within a generation, there was no British province to defend. The Saxons had come to stay.

西罗马帝国的终结也随之而来。公元406年12月31日，苏维汇人从莱茵河东岸出发，与来自更东方的汪达尔人以及阿兰人（他们并非德语使用者，而是伊朗人，被匈奴人驱逐出黑海沿岸草原）一起，大规模渡过冰封的莱茵河。随后，他们横扫高卢，进入西班牙。汪达尔人继续前进，渡过直布罗陀海峡（当时仍被称为赫拉克勒斯之柱），并在公元439年于北非的迦太基建立起统治（他们在那里建立了一支海军，并成为地中海的新兴霸主）。

The end of the Roman empire in the west was soon to follow. On 31 December 406 there had been a mass crossing of the frozen Rhine: Suebi from the east side of the Rhine, together with Vandals originally from farther east, and Alans (not German speakers at all, but Iranians, driven out of the Pontic steppes by the Huns), then cut a swath across Gaul and entered Spain. The Vandals kept going, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar (then still known as the Pillars of Hercules), and by 439 were established at Carthage in North Africa (where they built a navy and became the new power in the Mediterranean).

阿拉里克于公元410年成功攻入罗马（尽管当时的统治中心已迁至拉文纳），并犯下了洗劫罗马城的滔天罪行，但不久后便去世了。西哥特人随后继续推进，横跨法国南部，进入伊比利亚半岛，将此前占据该地区的苏维汇人、阿兰人和汪达尔人围困在半岛的角落里。他们在那里建立了一个新的王国，统治了250年之久，最初以图卢兹为都城，后来迁至托莱多。^*最终，在公元711年，他们的统治被一种对欧洲而言前所未有的事件所终结——来自南方的穆斯林（阿拉伯语系）入侵。

Alaric had succeeded in entering Rome in 410 (although the centre of government had moved to Ravenna), and committed the ultimate horror of sacking it, but died shortly after. The Visigoths then continued an advance that took them across southern France and into Iberia, constricting into its corners the preceding Suebi, Alans and Vandals. There they founded a new kingdom that lasted 250 years, ruling first from Toulouse, and later Toledo.^* Ultimately, in 711, their reign was terminated by something completely new for Europe, a Muslim (Arabic-speaking) invasion from the south.

但在东方，阿拉里克之后的一代人目睹了匈奴王阿提拉（公元435年至453年在位）将匈奴的疆域向西扩展，囊括了整个德国。† 451年，他被阻挡在高卢之外，不久后便去世了，他的帝国瓦解成西部日耳曼部落和东部斯拉夫人的领地，匈奴人只在黑海一带占据主导地位。

But back in the east, the generation following Alaric had seen Attila, king of the Turkic-speaking Huns from 435 to 453, bring the Hunnish domain west to include all of Germany.† He was held off from Gaul in 451, and when he died soon after, his empire disintegrated into a mosaic of German tribes in the west, and a Slav area in the east, with the Huns dominant only back round the Black Sea.

到公元476年，罗马的政治中心已经陷落，末代皇帝，年幼的罗慕路斯·奥古斯都鲁斯，被奥多亚克人道地废黜。奥多亚克曾是阿提拉的追随者，讲德语，但最近却是帝国的将领之一。随后，日耳曼人的各个部落以惊人的速度在旧帝国的残骸中扩散和定居。不到五十年，法兰克人（他们已经在今天的比利时地区定居了两百年，甚至被帝国雇佣为边境巡逻队）控制了高卢的大部分地区，他们从北部扩张，而勃艮第人则占据了南部一大片但逐渐缩小的领土。东哥特人很快被同样是日耳曼人的伦巴第人取代，他们控制着意大利、高卢西南部和亚得里亚海东岸的达尔马提亚。此后，欧洲西部开始逐渐稳定下来；但欧洲东部尚未遭受阿瓦尔人（自550年起）和保加尔人的入侵，随后是可萨人（自650年起）和马扎尔人（自750年起）。

By 476 the political centre of Rome had fallen, and the last emperor, the juvenile Romulus Augustulus, had been humanely deposed by Odoacer, who had once been a German-speaking follower of Attila, but most recently one of the empire’s own commanders. Different tribes of Germani then spread and settled with bewildering speed across the corpse of the old empire. Within fifty years, the Franks (who for two hundred years had been settled in the area of modern Belgium, even employed by the empire as border patrols) had assumed control of most of Gaul, spreading from the north, with the Burgundians holding a large, but diminishing, area in the south. The Ostrogoths, soon to be displaced by the equally Germanic Lombards, held Italy, the south-west of Gaul and Dalmatia on the eastern Adriatic coast. After this the west of Europe began to settle down; but the east of Europe had yet to undergo incursions in turn from Avars (from 550) and Bulgars swiftly followed by Khazars (from 650) and Magyars (from 750).§

令人惊讶的是，这场持续150年、席卷西欧的政治和人口动荡，对语言的影响却微乎其微。诚然，在公元400年至850年间，乌拉尔山脉以西地区肯定出现过一些新语言的交响，即便只是短暂的。但易北河以西的地区，除了日耳曼语族（撒克逊语、日耳曼语和哥特语）的回响逐渐消逝之外，几乎没有发生什么变化。这些语言迅速穿过高卢中部平原，最终消失在更南更西的地区。凯撒征服高卢后，该地区的语言格局基本保持不变，与公元前50年左右凯撒征服高卢后的情况基本相同。

Amazingly, the linguistic effects of this political and demographic turmoil, which lasted 150 years in the west of Europe, were slight. Certainly a polyphony of new languages must have been heard, if briefly, west of the Urals between 400 and 850. But west of the Elbe there can have been precious little change from the state of affairs essentially brought about by Caesar’s conquest of Gaul around 50 BC, other than the vanishing echoes of Germanic languages, Saxon, German and Gothic, as they passed rapidly across the central plains of Gaul and out of hearing in the farther reaches to the south and west.

^*他们的崛起以与巴斯克人的无休止斗争而著称：每个国王都在自己的编年史中做出骄傲但显然空洞的吹嘘“domuit Vascones——他驯服了巴斯克人”。

^* Their ascendancy was notable for unending struggle against the Basques: each king making the proud, but apparently empty, boast in his annals ’domuit Vascones–he tamed the Basques’.

† 奇怪的是，阿提拉实际上是他的哥特语昵称，意思是“爸爸”。

† Strangely, Attila is really his nickname in Gothic, and means ‘Dad’.

§ 在这些语言中，只有马扎尔人所说的语言比较明确：它是匈牙利语，与西伯利亚北部的乌拉尔语系有关。至于其他语言，阿瓦尔语可能属于蒙古语，保加尔语和可萨突厥语可能属于突厥语系。古阿瓦尔语似乎与现在所知的阿瓦尔语不同，后者是高加索东北部的一种语言，通行于达吉斯坦和阿塞拜疆，与突厥语系完全无关。保加尔语可能至今仍在西伯利亚的一些零星地区使用，被称为楚瓦什语。（这个名字与塔布加奇（Tabgach ）相同，塔布加奇是公元四世纪征服中国北方的民族的名称。）（参见第四章“从黄河到长江的语言”，第140页。）可萨人统治着从里海到基辅的地区长达一个世纪（约公元650-750年），他们最著名的事件是公元861年集体皈依犹太教。今天的卡拉伊姆人是他们的后裔。另一个突厥语族群，金帐汗国的鞑靼人，在十三世纪迁徙至此。

§ Of these, only the language spoken by the Magyars is clear: it was Hungarian, related to the Uralian languages of northern Siberia. As for the others, Avar was probably a Mongol and Bulgar and Khazar Turkic languages. Old Avar does not seem to have been the same as what is now known as Avar, which is a language of the north-east Caucasus, spoken in Daghestan and Azerbaijan, and quite unrelated to Turkic. Bulgar may survive in scattered pockets across Siberia to this day, known as Chuvash. (This name is identical with Tabgach, the name of a people famous for their fourth-century conquest of northern China.) (See Chapter 4, ‘Language from Huang-he to Yangtze’, p. 140.) The Khazars ruled from the Caspian Sea to Kiev for a century (c.650-750), and are chiefly famous for their choice of mass conversion to Judaism in 861. Today’s Karaim are their descendants. Another Turkic group, the Tatars of the Golden Horde, moved across in the thirteenth century.

当奔腾的马蹄扬起的尘土散去，篷车的吱嘎声也渐渐消失，中世纪欧洲新晋自封王室宫殿上的镀金也已干涸，语言的边界却出奇地熟悉。在帝国边境长期受到严密防守的时期，日耳曼语的边界或许略微向西移动了一些，这在很大程度上是因为邻近的日耳曼人越来越多地被邀请越过边界，作为“盟约之民” （foederati）或“欢乐之人” （laeti），为罗马社会效力，无论是在军队还是在农田。但日耳曼语和罗曼语之间的分界线仍然从莱茵河口西端向东南方向延伸。高卢部分地区屡次沦陷于日耳曼人的统治之下，最终又牢牢地被法兰克人所掌控，但这并没有改变或进一步改变这条分界线。

When the dust from galloping hoofs had cleared, the creak of covered wagons had died away, and the gilt had dried on the palaces of the newly self-appointed royal families of medieval Europe, language boundaries were eerily familiar. The edge of Germanic had possibly slipped a little to the west during the long period when the empire’s borders had still been defended, not least because neighbouring Germans had increasingly been invited across it, as foederati, ‘treaty people’, or laeti, ‘joyous ones’, to serve in the army, or on the land, for the benefit of Roman society. But the line between Germanic and Romance was still drawn from the western end of the mouths of the Rhine in a south-eastward direction. And the repeated falling of parts of Gaul under German domination, and ultimately being firmly settled under the Franks, did not serve to translate it or rotate it further.

法兰克人统治未能取代高卢语言的局面，在其他新兴的日耳曼王国中也同样存在。在东哥特人和伦巴第人统治下的意大利，在汪达尔人、苏维汇人、阿兰人和西哥特人先后统治下的伊比利亚半岛，以及在汪达尔人统治下的北非沿海地区，罗马帝国时期建立的语言都得以延续。^*尽管西哥特人统治西班牙长达250年，但人们几乎无法在西班牙语中找到大量从这一时期借入的哥特语词汇。西班牙历史语言学家梅嫩德斯·皮达尔写道：

The failure of Frankish domination to replace the language of Gaul was paralleled in the other new German kingdoms. In Italy under the Ostrogoths and Lombards, in Iberia under a succession of Vandals, Suebi, Alans and Visigoths, in coastal North Africa under the Vandals, the language established under the Roman empire persisted.^* Despite the fact that the Visigoths ruled Spain for 250 years, one cannot even detect a significant number of Gothic words borrowed into Spanish from this period. Menéndez Pidal, the Spanish historical linguist, writes:

西班牙语中的日耳曼语成分似乎并非如人们预期的那样，源于西哥特人对伊比利亚半岛的统治：入侵者的数量相对较少，不足以产生显著影响；此外，西哥特人在抵达西班牙之前，已在达契亚、默西亚、意大利本土和高卢与罗马人密切接触了两个世纪，时而结盟，时而敌对，深受罗马文化的影响。 ⁴³

It appears that the Germanic elements in Spanish do not proceed, in general, from the Visigoth domination of the peninsula, as might have been expected: the number of invaders was relatively slight to have much influence; moreover, the Visigoths, before reaching Spain had lived for two centuries in intimate contact with the Romans, now as allies now as enemies, in Dacia, Moesia, in Italy itself and in Gaul, and were very much permeated with Roman culture.⁴³

^拉丁语在北非曾风靡一时，在汪达尔人的统治下长达一个世纪（428-533年），之后又被君士坦丁堡复兴的罗马帝国所控制，直至696年。最著名的居民，希波主教圣奥古斯丁（354-430年）的成就，若非身处拉丁语环境，是难以想象的。他的一些布道词表明，拉丁语与迦太基古语布匿语的双语现象可能一直持续到公元四世纪（Sznycer 1996）。显然，普通民众仍然继续使用柏柏尔语（直到今天也是如此）。但八世纪阿拉伯人的征服，以及柏柏尔语内陆地区皈依伊斯兰教，对该地区通用语言的改变，其影响速度远超汪达尔人（甚至可能超过罗马人，毕竟自独立的迦太基被摧毁后的750年间）。

^* Latin bore a charmed life in North Africa, for a century (428-533) under the Vandals, and then controlled by the Roman empire resurgent from Constantinople until 696. The career of the most famous resident, St Augustine (354-430), bishop of Hippo, would have been unthinkable outside a Latin-speaking milieu. Remarks he makes in some of his sermons provide evidence that bilingualism with Punic, the old language of Carthage, may have persisted until the fourth century (Sznycer 1996). Evidently the common people continued to speak Berber (as they do to this day). But the Arab takeover in the eighth century, backed up by the conversion to Islam of the Berber-speaking hinterland, would be much more quickly influential in changing the region’s working language than the Vandals had been (or perhaps even the Romans, in the 750 years since the destruction of the independent Carthage).

我们的解释只能是事后诸葛亮。毫无疑问，大多数推进的日耳曼人都是战士，他们也无疑会从最终定居的当地居民中娶妻。在远离德国的新家园里，语言很可能是由当地的母亲及其家庭决定的。但同样的道理也适用于五百年前入侵高卢的罗马人，或者一千年后西班牙征服墨西哥和秘鲁之后的情况。然而，在那些地方，征服者的语言无疑通过融入新的经济秩序的机会而传播开来，并很快占据了主导地位。显然，在这里，征服者别无所求，只是想让旧秩序置于新的统治之下。但在击败了旧秩序的捍卫者之后，他们最终却不得不依靠受害者来维持他们所追求的生活。这在中国比在西方历史上更为常见^。

Our explanations have to be post hoc. No doubt the majority of advancing Germans would have been fighting men, and no doubt they would have taken brides from the populations among whom they eventually settled. The language in the new homes, so far from Germany, would have been set by the local mother and her family. But the same could have been said about the Roman invaders of Gaul five hundred years before, or indeed Mexico and Peru after the Spanish conquests a millennium later. Yet there, the conquerors’ language, spreading no doubt through the opportunities it gave to be part of the new economic order, soon began to win out. Here, apparently, the conquerors had no wish other than to put the old order under new management. But after beating its defenders, they ultimately depended on their victims to provide the life they sought. It is a tale more familiar in China than anything in the history of the West.^*

从此以后，口语拉丁语被称为罗曼语，这标志着通俗拉丁语的各种方言开始独立发展（尽管现存最早的法语前身文献仅可追溯至公元842年）。† 日耳曼人和阿兰人的入侵标志着帝国民防的彻底崩溃。随之而来的社会动荡导致教育资源匮乏。事实上，有证据表明，自上个世纪的动荡以来，文盲率一直在各地上升。保存下来的铭文数量在三世纪中叶开始下降，意大利的情况尤为严重，上默西亚（今波斯尼亚）等边境地区的情况则更为急剧，并在公元400年左右彻底消失。44 五世纪^初，奥古斯丁在北非写作时，将一个奴隶识字的故事描述为奇迹。⁴⁵六世纪中叶，阿雷拉特（阿尔勒，马赛附近）的凯撒里乌斯意识到，不仅乡下人，甚至商人也可能不识字。46^如果没有普及教育，人们对古典拉丁语规范的认知就无法再阻止口头传承。

Spoken Latin is from this point on called Romance, signalling that the emerging dialects of Vulgar Latin were now free to develop independently of one another (although the first vernacular document that survives in a precursor of French dates only from 842).† The German and Alan invasions marked the final, total failure of the empire’s civil defence. One of the effects of the social dislocation that came in its train would have been a breakdown in the availability of education. In fact, there is evidence that illiteracy had been growing everywhere since the instability of the preceding century. Numbers of preserved inscriptions decline in the mid-third century, severely in Italy, drastically in a border region such as Upper Moesia (modern Bosnia), dying out everywhere around 400.⁴⁴ Augustine, writing in North Africa in the early fifth century, recounts as a miracle the story of a slave who could read.⁴⁵ In the middle of the sixth century, Caesarius of Arelate (Arles, near Marseilles) recognises that not only rūsticī but even negōtiātōres (merchants and businessmen) may be unable to read.⁴⁶ Without widespread education, consciousness of the norms of classical Latin would no longer act as a brake on oral transmission.

除了学术传统和记忆的衰落之外，还有两个因素促成了拉丁语作为单一语言的瓦解。其一是，在其分布范围内，许多身居要职的人都以拉丁语为母语，但他们的父母却说着其他语言，通常是日耳曼语族语言。其二是中央集权式行政管理体系的瓦解和封建社会的兴起：个人和家庭被更加紧密地组织成等级森严的阶层，从国王及其贵族支持者到小农及其农奴，每一层都维系着个人的效忠和臣服。这意味着各地变得更加封闭：人们越来越倾向于留在原地，只与邻居接触；其结果是，罗马方言更快地分化成各种地方方言和语言。

Besides the weakening of scholarly tradition and memory, two other forces will have fostered the break-up of Latin as a single language. One is that, all over its range, Latin had speakers who were in positions of influence but whose parents had grown up speaking something else, most often a Germanic language. The other stemmed from the breakdown of the centralised systematic administration, and the rise of feudal society: individuals and families were organised much more into personal hierarchies, from the king and his baronial supporters down to the smallholder and his serfs, each link bound by personal loyalties of homage. This meant that localities became more inward: increasingly, people stayed put, in contact only with their neighbours; and the result was a faster separation of Roman speech into local dialects and languages.

^*最新的例子就是满族，他们从1644年到1911年统治中国，但最终完全被其统治下的人民同化。他们的语言现在濒临灭绝。（参见第四章“从黄河到长江的语言”，第143页。）

^* Just the latest example is the Manchu, who ruled China from 1644 to 1911, but were totally absorbed by their subject population. Their language is now on the edge of extinction. (See Chapter 4, ‘Language from Huang-he to Yangtze’, p. 143.)

†《斯特拉斯堡誓言》是路德维希二世（德国人）和秃头查理之间签订的条约。具有讽刺意味的是，它是在法国、德国和意大利大部分地区恢复统一政府之后才签订的。（参见第八章，第317页。）

† The ‘Strasburg Oaths’, a treaty between Ludwig the German and Charles the Bald. Ironically, it comes only after the restoration of a single government across most of France, German and Italy. (See Chapter 8, p. 317.)

巴尔干半岛的斯拉夫曙光

Slavonic dawn in the Balkans

但从语言角度来看，日耳曼人西迁的净影响微乎其微，而同样遭受东方入侵的斯拉夫人（塔西佗笔下的威尼蒂人）则幸运得多。五世纪中叶，匈奴人横扫威尼蒂人，随后撤退至黑海，威尼蒂人及其后裔则永久迁入波兰东部平原（波利耶），这片平原此前被汪达尔人和伦巴第人等其他民族占据。随后阿瓦尔人和保加尔人的入侵，大多被东罗马帝国成功抵御。但这些入侵不仅将剩余的日耳曼人（^吉皮德人、东哥特人和伦巴第人）驱逐出喀尔巴阡山脉和巴尔干半岛等南部地区，也为斯拉夫人的南进提供了掩护。六世纪，斯拉夫人控制了从亚得里亚海沿岸的阿奎莱亚到君士坦丁堡的交通要道，这条道路使得帝国东部的这一地区与讲拉丁语的意大利保持着紧密的联系。通过这条道路，他们最终进入了罗马帝国的巴尔干地区，包括——正如我们所见（参见第六章“衰落的迹象”，第261页）——希腊本身。在这个传统的文明世界中心，他们逐渐被当地居民所接纳和同化；但在更北的地方，他们的人口数量则更为庞大。到了七世纪，斯拉夫人已经控制了东欧的大部分地区，并一直延续至今^。

But if, from the language point of view, the net effect of the Germans’ westward Völkerwanderung was nil, their fellow victims of incursion from the east, the Slavs (Tacitus’s Veneti), had far better luck. In the mid-fifth century, the Huns surged through and past them, then withdrew to the Black Sea, leaving the Veneti and their kin to move permanently into the eastern plains (pol^ye) of Poland vacated by the Vandals and Lombards, among others. The following surges of Avars and Bulgars were more or less successfully resisted by the eastern Roman empire. But they served not only to flush the remaining Germans (Gepids, Ostrogoths and Lombards) out of the more southerly areas, the Carpathians and the Balkans; they also served to cover the Slavs’ push southward. In the sixth century, the Slavs took possession of the arterial route from Aquileia on the Adriatic to Constantinople, a road that had kept this part of the empire, alone in the east, strongly linked to Latin-speaking Italy. In this way they finally moved into the Balkan territories of the Roman empire, including—as we have seen (see Chapter 6, ‘Intimations of decline’, p. 261 )—Greece itself. In that traditional centre of the civilised world they were to be diffused and assimilated by the residents; but farther north, their relative numbers were far more overwhelming. By the seventh century the Slavs had been left in linguistic possession of most of eastern Europe, where they are to this day.^*

一个自然而然的问题随之而来：为什么斯拉夫征服者的语言得以确立，而日耳曼人的语言却大多消失了？但这个问题并没有明确的答案。拉丁语至少以罗马尼亚语的形式流传了下来；这或许表明，正如在西欧一样，斯拉夫入侵者在遇到组织更为完善的文化时放弃了他们的语言。但地理情况却难以解释这一观点。达尔马提亚和默西亚（今南斯拉夫和保加利亚）是罗马长期的行省，自公元106-107年图拉真征服整个巴尔干地区以来，罗马的统治地位一直未受挑战；达契亚（今罗马尼亚）则因战略原因于公元271年被放弃，当时讲日耳曼语的吉皮德人和西哥特人占领了该地区。诚然，图拉真最初确实在达契亚安置了大量殖民者。⁴⁷直到二十世纪初，达尔马提亚沿岸仍有罗曼语使用者（希腊人称之为罗姆人）居住。但解释似乎是，在接下来的几个世纪里，拉丁语人口从默西亚向北迁徙到达契亚；直到十一世纪，瓦拉几亚游牧民一直是帝国北部边境地区的一道风景^。48

The question naturally arises: why did the Slavic conquerors’ language establish itself, while that of the Germans largely disappeared? But there is no evident answer. Latin survived as Romanian at least; and this might suggest that, as in western Europe, the Slavic invaders had abandoned their language in an area where they were confronted with a more organised culture. But the geography hardly fits. It was Dalmatia and Moesia (former Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria) that were long-term Roman provinces, unchallenged since Trajan had conquered the whole area of the Balkans in AD 106-7; Dacia (modern Romania) had been abandoned for strategic reasons in 271, when Germanic-speaking Gepids and Visigoths had taken over. It is true that Dacia had at first been heavily settled with colonists by Trajan.⁴⁷ And there were surviving Romance speakers (known to the Greeks as Rhômšnoi) up and down the Dalmatian coast until the beginning of the twentieth century. But the explanation seems to be that the Latin-speaking population drifted northward from Moesia into Dacia over the next few centuries; Bláxoi hodîtai, ‘Vlach nomads’, were a feature of the scenery on the northern marches of the empire up until the eleventh century.⁴⁸

^*他们在十世纪破例接纳了马扎尔人，从而在斯拉夫中欧的中心地带形成了匈牙利人聚居区。

^* They made a late exception to admit the Magyars in the tenth century, creating the Hungarian pocket in the midst of Slavic central Europe.

无论其间经历了怎样的历史，巴尔干地区的罗马文化始终处于某种前哨地位，似乎始终不够强大，无法在新的斯拉夫统治者统治下复兴。

Whatever the intervening history, the Roman culture of the Balkan area, always something of an outpost, does not seem to have been strong enough ever to revive under the new Slavic masters.

逆境而行：英语的出现

Against the odds: The advent of English

或许在罗马帝国的另一端也发生了类似的事情，因为在这一时期，不列颠也因外敌入侵而失去了拉丁语，也失去了不列颠语。这种语言更替事件，同时也是英语的起源，在当时是史无前例的——这是日耳曼征服者唯一一次能够保留自己语言的时期。

Perhaps something similar happened at the opposite end of the Roman dominions, for Britain too lost its Latin in the face of invasions in this period. It also lost its British. This event of language replacement, which is also the origin of the English language, was unparalleled in its age—the one and only time that Germanic conquerors were able to hold on to their own language.

乍看之下，不列颠的命运本应与高卢、伊比利亚，甚至意大利如出一辙。日耳曼入侵者，这次来自欧洲西北海岸，于公元五世纪进入罗马帝国摇摇欲坠的行省，从此再未返回故土。鉴于西欧的经验，这本应导致几个世纪的动荡，之后才会建立一个相对稳定的王国，或者（如果统一失败）形成一系列国家，最终这些国家会使用某种新的拉丁语变体。然而，实际情况却是，入侵者（我们可以简单地称之为“撒克逊人” ^）从东南向西北逐步推进并定居下来。这一过程或许从未完全完成，但至少在六世纪末覆盖了低地地区，直至奔宁山脉和达特穆尔，并在七世纪末占据了现代英格兰的大部分地区和苏格兰东南部。在同一时期，区域王国的数量逐渐减少到三个，即诺森布里亚、麦西亚和威塞克斯。

Prima facie, the fate of Britain should have been just like that of Gaul or Iberia, or indeed Italy. Germanic invaders, in this case from the north-western coast of Europe, entered a reeling province of the Roman empire in the fifth century AD, and never went home. In light of the experience of western Europe, this should have resulted in a few centuries of turmoil before the establishment of a more or less stable kingdom or (failing unification) an array of states, which would have ended up speaking some new variant of Latin. In fact what happened was a gradual advance and settlement of the invaders (whom we may term oversimply ‘Saxons’^*), from the south-east towards the north-west, a process arguably never completed but at least covering the lowland areas up to the Pennines and Dartmoor by the end of the sixth century, and most of modern England and south-eastern Scotland by the end of the seventh. Gradually, over the same period, the number of regional kingdoms reduced to three, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex.

从语言学角度来看，中间阶段尚不明确，但拉丁语作为一种流行语言的胜利，如同欧洲大陆上一贯发生的那样，似乎从未出现过。英国社会从未出现过被撒克逊人接管的迹象；这更像是一个经典的入侵故事：外来入侵者逐步建立桥头堡，然后扩张，并按照自己的方式建立新的秩序，就像欧洲帝国主义者在美洲的扩张一样。当时没有用不列颠语写成的记录，但用拉丁语留下的记录（尤其是吉尔达斯的《不列颠人的毁灭》，约公元540年，以及内尼乌斯编纂的公元800年之前的文集）将撒克逊人描绘成充满敌意的破坏者。西撒克逊人从九世纪起就用自己的语言识字（这本身对日耳曼入侵者来说就是一种奇特的语言），北欧人则稍晚一些。他们都不太在意他们的不列颠先民。

Linguistically, the intermediate stages are obscure, but the triumph of Latin as a popular language, analogously to what always happened on the Continent, never even looked possible. There is never any sense of a takeover of British society by Saxons; it is more the classic story of alien invaders gradually establishing a bridgehead, then spreading out, and building a new order on their own terms, like European imperialists in the Americas. There are no records in British of the period, but the records left in Latin (notably Gildas’s De Excidio Britonum, ‘The Ruin of the British’, c.540, and Nennius’s compilation of Excerpta up to c.800) paint a hostile picture of the Saxons as destroyers. West Saxons were literate from the ninth century in their own language (itself a curiosity for Germanic invaders), the Norsemen from a little later. Neither pay much heed to their British predecessors.

这怎么可能呢？毕竟，不列颠人与高卢人一样，继承了四百年的罗马文明，而且以军事实力著称；事实上，不列颠的两位君主（公元388年的马克西姆斯和公元407年的君士坦丁）在之前的五十年里曾两次成功率军入侵欧洲大陆。诚然，主力部队当时已经撤退到意大利，让撒克逊人得以建立桥头堡，但在随后的几代人中，不列颠人仍然应该拥有深厚的军事经验，能够在他们仍然控制的90%的国土上重新集结，要么击退入侵者，要么迫使他们做出妥协。

How could this be? The Britons, after all, were heirs to four hundred years of Roman civilisation, just like the Gauls, and were if anything notorious for their military prowess; indeed, potentates from Britain (Maximus in 388, Constantine in 407) had twice led successful forces on to the Continent in the previous fifty years. Granted that the major forces had already been withdrawn to Italy, allowing the Saxons to make their bridgehead, in the generations that followed the Britons should still have had expertise in depth to regroup in the 90 per cent of the country they still controlled, and either drive back, or force a compromise with, the incomers.

^实际上，关于这些入侵者的身份，史料中存在着隐含的争议。显然，他们讲的是低地德语方言，但吉尔达斯（一位凯尔特人，著于公元550年之前）称他们为撒克逊人（更准确地说，是“那些凶残的撒克逊人，名字不可言说，令上帝和世人憎恶”，第23卷第1章），而普罗科皮乌斯（一位希腊人，与此事关联较少，也著于公元550年之前，可能参考了法兰克人派往拜占庭的使团成员从盎格鲁人那里获得的信息）则称他们是盎格鲁人和弗里西亚人（《哥特战争史》，第4卷第20章）。是可敬的贝德在其731年出版的历史著作中称他们为盎格鲁人、撒克逊人和朱特人（第1卷第15章）。撒克逊人和法兰克人（分别以他们最喜欢的武器——短刀和标枪——命名）并不在塔西佗所知的部落之列，但他们可能居住在塔西佗所说的乔基人和通格里人居住的地方，分别位于威悉河和莱茵河的河口。

^* There is actually an implicit dispute in the sources on who these invaders were. Evidently they were speakers of a Low German dialect, but Gildas ( a Celt, writing before 550) calls them Saxons ( or more exactly Saxones ferocissimi illi nefandi nominis Saxones deo hominibusque invisi, ‘those ferocious Saxons of unspeakable name hateful to God and men’, xxiii.l), while Procopius (a Greek—less personally involved—writing also before 550, and probably using information from Angles on a Frankish mission to Byzantium) says they were Angles and Frisians (Gothic War, iv.20). It is the Venerable Bede, in his history published in 731, who calls them Angles, Saxons and Jutes ( i. 15 ). The Saxons and Franks (named for their favourite weapons, the seax or knife and the franca or javelin) were not among the tribes known to Tacitus, but would have lived where he places the Chauci and the Tungri, at the mouths of the Weser and Rhine respectively.

相反，我们看到的是一种稳步的衰退，以及英语——一种融合了盎格鲁语、撒克逊语、弗里西亚语，或许还有低地德语的朱特语变体的语言——在全国范围内的纯粹传播。事实上，日耳曼语族语言的这种传播，唯一可以与之相提并论的，是日耳曼入侵者在北海诸岛和冰岛等未开垦的处女地中所发生的情况。在那里，维京人的语言——古诺尔斯语——自然而然地传播开来，因为它没有竞争对手。难道居住在城市化低地的不列颠人就这样消失了吗？要解释这些日耳曼语族语言，尤其是英语，在英国的横扫，恐怕无需其他解释。

Instead we see a steady fall-back, and the unmixed spread across the country of English, a mixture of Angle, Saxon, Frisian and perhaps Jutish varieties of Low German. The only parallel, in fact, to this spread of a Germanic language is what happened when the Germanic invaders encountered virgin territory, in the islands of the North Sea and in Iceland. There of course the Vikings’ language, Old Norse, spread, because it had no competition. Could the Britons of the urbanised lowlands somehow have just melted away? Nothing less is needed to explain the complete walkover within Britain of those Germanic languages, and above all of English.

大卫·基斯（David Keys）最近提出的一个理论认为，他们可能确实经历过鼠疫。49^六世纪中叶（接近公元550年），鼠疫沿着地中海的贸易路线传入英国。值得注意的是，鼠疫袭击的应该是英国（岛屿的西部和中部），而不是英格兰（东南部），因为只有英国与罗马帝国保持着贸易联系。而且，鼠疫不太可能传播到撒克逊人，因为他们不与不列颠人交往，并且居住在罗马城镇之外，人口密度可能较低。根据《阿尔斯特编年史》的记载，鼠疫几乎与袭击爱尔兰的“大瘟疫”（mortālitās magna）同时发生，这场瘟疫摧毁了爱尔兰的贵族阶层（无疑也摧毁了其他所有阶层）。根据《威尔士编年史》的记载，威尔士格温内斯国王梅尔贡（Maelgwn）也于公元547年或549年死于鼠疫。民间对这种可怕疾病及其造成的人口锐减的记忆，将留在亚瑟王的荒原传说中，将饥荒与军事失败以及（国王的）腹股沟处的神秘伤口联系起来——这是鼠疫的特征之一。

A recent theory, from David Keys, says that they may have.⁴⁹ The mid-sixth century (close to 550) was the time when bubonic plague entered Britain, along trade routes from the Mediterranean. Significantly, it would have been Britain (the west and centre of the island) which it hit, rather than England (the south-east), because only Britain maintained trade links with the empire. And it would be less likely to spread to the Saxons since they did not consort with Britons and, living outside the established Roman towns and cities, may have lived at a lower density. It would have been virtually simultaneous with the mortālitās magna that hit Ireland, according to the Annals of Ulster, devastating the aristocracy (and no doubt every other class). Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd in Wales, also died of plague in 547 or 549, according to the Annales Cambriae. A folk memory of this dreadful disease, and the depopulation it caused, would remain in the Arthurian legend of the Waste Land, combining famine with military defeat, and a mysterious wound (to the king) in the groin area—one of the characteristics of bubonic plague.

甚至有一些基因证据也令人震惊地证实了这一点。一项近期研究比较了从安格尔西岛到弗里斯兰岛沿线人群的Y染色体DNA模式，发现威尔士人至今仍与英格兰中部地区的人群明显不同，但英格兰人和弗里斯兰人的样本却非常相似，这表明50%到100%的（男性）人口可能拥有共同的祖先；这可能是由于弗里斯兰岛的大规模迁徙造成的。 ⁵⁰假设罗马时期该岛的人口达到300万到400万，那么除了瘟疫之外，似乎很难有其他任何因素能够将不列颠人从英格兰中部地区的祖先中彻底清除。

There is even a little genetic evidence that strikingly bears this out. Comparing the pattern of Y-chromosome DNA from samples in a line across from Anglesey to Friesland, a recent study found that the Welshmen were to this day clearly distinct from those in central England, but that the English and Frisian samples were so similar that they pointed to a common origin of 50-100 per cent of the (male) population; this could have resulted from a mass migration from Friesland.⁵⁰ On the usual assumption that the Roman-period population of the island had reached 3 to 4 million, it seems hardly possible that anything other than an epidemic could have so eliminated the Britons from the ancestry of central England.

于是，英国人取而代之。然而，他们并未长期独占岛上的东部和中部地区：八世纪末，一股新的势力涌入，他们是来自斯堪的纳维亚的日耳曼入侵者，即诺斯人或维京人。他们从沿海劫掠开始，逐步在苏格兰西部和诺森布里亚东部定居，最终通过条约（约公元886年）与撒克逊人瓜分了整个岛屿，并在1013年彻底征服了整个王国。征服者是斯韦恩·福克比尔德，他的儿子克努特（即后来的克努特）继承了他的王位。

So English supervened. It did not long have the eastern and central regions of the island to itself: in the late eighth century a new force entered the system, a new set of Germanic invaders, the Norsemen or Vikings, from Scandinavia. They progressed from coastal raids to settlement in the west of Scotland and the east of Northumbria to a partition of the island with the Saxons by treaty (c.886), and finally in 1013 to outright conquest of the whole kingdom. This was by Sveinn Forkbeard, succeeded by his son Knútr, better known as Canute.

与英式英语和英式英语之间的隔阂不同，盎格鲁-撒克逊人和维京人之间的关系，尽管最初充满敌意，但从长远来看却相当开放。理解这一点的一种方式是将维京人视为典型的日耳曼入侵者，他们是军事劫掠者，赢得了大多数战役，却失去了和平——因为他们定居下来（或许娶了英国妻子），并很大程度上吸收了他们臣民或受害者的语言。然而，由于他们定居的语言与他们的英语关系较为密切（尽管两者之间有着长达二十代的独立发展），因此很容易出现双语现象，并产生一定程度的相互理解。其结果是，大量的北欧语借词涌入英语，并对英语语法产生了相当大的影响。在现代英语中，大约7%的基本词汇源自明显的北欧语（包括take、get、keep、leg、sky、skin和skirt等词）。⁵¹正是这两种语言的混合，产生了看似毫不相关的第三人称代词：他、它、她和他们。^*

Unlike the British-English divide, relations between Anglo-Saxon and Viking, if initially hostile, proved fairly permeable in the longer term. One way of understanding this is to see the Vikings as classic Germanic invaders, military raiders who won most of the battles but lost the peace, in that they settled down—perhaps with English wives—and largely picked up their subjects’ or victims’ language. Nevertheless, since the language into which they were settling was a close-ish relative (though with a good twenty generations of separate development behind it), there was easy scope for bilingualism and a degree of mutual understanding. The result was an abundant infusion of Norse loan words into English, and quite a lot of impact on the grammar too. In modern English, some 7 per cent of the basic vocabulary is of distinctly Norse origin (including such words as take, get, keep, leg, sky, skin and skirt);⁵¹ and it is this mix of the two languages which gave rise to the bizarrely unrelated set of third-person pronouns he, it, she and they.^*

西欧早期征服时代由此落下帷幕，日耳曼人向西迁徙，斯拉夫人向南迁徙，呈现出万花筒般的变幻景象。日耳曼人只有在征服了几乎或完全无人居住的地区——例如饱受瘟疫蹂躏的英国和此前无人居住的冰岛——时，才能保留自己的语言。他们在罗马帝国西部腹地的征服基本上没有对语言产生影响。拉丁语在欧洲大陆西部和南部依然盛行；在那里，罗马征服的语言影响从未被消除。斯拉夫人或许是因为入侵的地区文明程度较低——因而人口也较少——所以在巴尔干半岛定居后产生了更大的影响；但在他们征服的古老文明地区，例如希腊和安纳托利亚的部分地区，他们最终也被同化或消灭了。

The early era of western European conquests thus closed with a kaleidoscopic shifting of Germans westward, and of Slavs southward. The Germans were able to retain their language only when they conquered territory that was largely, or totally, empty—Britain devastated by plague, and Iceland previously uninhabited. Their conquests in the western heartlands of the Roman empire had essentially no linguistic impact. Latin remained strong in the west and south of the continent; there, the linguistic effects of Roman conquest were never undone. The Slavs, perhaps because they were invading less civilised—and hence less highly populated—regions had much greater effect where they settled in the Balkans; but they too were absorbed or eliminated in the areas of ancient civilisation that they overran, parts of Greece and Anatolia.

长远来看，这造成了欧洲语言的划分，这种划分我们至今仍熟悉：南部和西部是罗曼语族，北部和中部是日耳曼语族，东部大部分地区是斯拉夫语族，东南部极地是希腊语族。五世纪的主要事件实际上是西北部的不列颠从罗曼语族（或许仍是凯尔特语族）的势力范围转向了日耳曼语族。此后，不列颠岛的语言格局发生了更大的变化：在接下来的千年里，日耳曼语族进一步向凯尔特语族的最后堡垒扩张，再加上后来罗曼语族试图重新确立其在日耳曼语族之上的地位，以及诺曼人征服英格兰。但这些事件的叙述，我们必须等到探讨英语本身的发展之后才能展开。

The long-term effect was a linguistic partition of Europe that has been familiar ever since: Romance in the south and west, Germanic in the north and centre, Slavic in most of the east, and Greek in the extreme south-east. The main event in the fifth century was in fact the switch of Britain in the northwest from the Romance (or perhaps still Celtic) to the Germanic zone. There was considerably more change to come in this island: the further spread of Germanic into the last redoubts of Celtic over the next thousand years, compounded by a late attempt at a reassertion of Romance over Germanic, and the Norman conquest of England. But the tale of these events must wait until we turn to the growth of English itself.

^*比较古英语中的这些代词（hē, hit, hēo, hīe）和古诺尔斯语中的这些代词（hann, that, hon, their/thau/thær——用英语的th代替诺尔斯语的ō）。古英语和诺尔斯语中保存完好的截然不同的词尾系统之间的混淆，也可能是导致名词格标记系统崩溃的原因之一。

^* Compare these pronouns in Old English (hē, hit, hēo, hīe) with Old Norse (hann, that, hon, their/thau/thær—using English th for the Norse ō). Mix-ups between rather different systems of endings, well preserved in both Old English and Norse, may also have caused the breakdown of case marking for nouns.

^*（这些星号表示语言学家重构的词形，但实际上并未在某些文本中找到。）P 音的缺失并不像看起来那么奇怪。它似乎也影响了伊比利亚半岛的本土语言，甚至早期的巴斯克语，而且也是现代阿拉伯语的典型特征。但凯尔特语并没有长期保持完全没有 P 音的状态。至少它的一些变体，包括大多数高卢语方言，以及不列颠语（最终演变为现代威尔士语、康沃尔语和布列塔尼语），后来开始将 qu- 音发成 p 音。因此，在表示“四”和“五”的词中出现了 p 音（现代威尔士语中的pedwar和pump ，根据一些窑炉记录的证据，高卢语中可能是^* petuar和^* pinpe，详见第 566 页注释 22）。因此，在原始语言中，词首的 qu- 是疑问词的标记（例如拉丁语中保守的quis、quid、quando，意为“谁、什么、何时”），而在凯尔特语的这一变体中，词首的 p- 则扮演了同样的角色（例如威尔士语中的pwy、pa、pam，意为“谁、哪个、为什么”，高卢语中可能也大致相同）。其他凯尔特语也改变了 qu- 的发音，但只是将其简化为 k- 音。因此，爱尔兰语中有 ceilhir、cóic（意为“四、五”）和cé、cad、cá（意为“谁、什么、哪里”）。现有证据表明，凯尔特伊比利亚语在这方面更接近爱尔兰语而非高卢语。

^* (These asterisks show forms that have been reconstructed by linguists, but are not actually found in some text.) This absence of P is not as strange as it might seem. It also seems to have afflicted the indigenous language of Iberia, and even early Basque, and is typical too of modern Arabic. But Celtic did not remain a totally P-less language for long. At least some of its variants, including most dialects of Gaulish, and also British (leading to modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton), later started to pronounce the sound qu- as p. Hence its presence in the words for four and five (pedwar and pump in modern Welsh, probably ^*petuar and ^*pinpe in Gaulish, on the evidence of some kiln records, mentioned in note 22 on p. 566). As a result, where initial qu- had been the mark of question words in the original language (cf. Latin’s conservative quis, quid, quando, ‘who, what, when’), initial p- has this role in this variety of Celtic language (cf. Welsh pwy, pa, pam, ‘who, which, why’, and presumably much the same in Gaulish). The other Celtic languages also changed the qu-, but just simplified it to a k- sound. Hence Irish ceilhir, cóic (’four, five’), and cé, cad, cá (’who, what, where’). What evidence there is for Celtiberian suggests it was more like Irish than Gaulish in this respect.

^*已知最早的伊特鲁里亚铭文可以追溯到大约一个世纪前，即公元前700年左右。伊特鲁里亚人是从希腊人那里学会了书写，不过他们很可能是通过与更南方的地区，比如那不勒斯湾的库迈附近的接触而学会的。

^* The earliest known Etruscan inscriptions date from about a century earlier, c.700 BC. The Etruscans had themselves learnt how to write from the Greeks, though probably through contacts much farther south, round Cumae in the Bay of Naples.

^*与更南方的卢西塔尼亚语形成对比：我们对这种语言的了解不过两个词，但这两个词就足以否定它是凯尔特语：porcom tavrom，“猪牛”。第一个词有P；第二个词的V和R顺序错误：可与高卢语tarvos 、古爱尔兰语tarb和中古威尔士语tarw进行比较。

^* Contrast Lusitanian, spoken farther south: we know hardly more than two words of this language, but those two words are enough to disqualify it as Celtic: porcom tavrom, ‘pig bull’. The first has a P; the second has its V and R in the wrong order: compare Gaulish tarvos. Old Irish tarb, Middle Welsh tarw.

^*相比之下，日耳曼语中“青铜”一词与拉丁语的词根相同：哥特语aiz，古英语ār，古高地德语ēr，而拉丁语aes，这表明在意大利语族和日耳曼语族的共同祖先分道扬镳之前，这项技术就已经得到广泛应用。

^* By contrast, Germanic has the same underlying root for ‘bronze’ as Latin: Gothic aiz, Old English ār, Old High German ēr versus Latin aes, suggesting that this technology was already an established acquisition before the common ancestors of the Italic- and Germanic-speaking tribes went their separate ways.

8

拉丁语的第一次死亡

8

The First Death of Latin

Philosophantem rhetorem intellegunt pauci，loquentem rusticum multi。

Philosophantem rhetorem intellegunt pauci, loquentem rusticum multi.

雄辩家的哲学说教鲜有人听懂，而普通人的话却能被许多人理解。

The rhetorician philosophising is understood by few, but the plain man speaking by many.

图尔的格雷戈里，《Historia Francorum》序言（公元575 年）¹

Gregory of Tours, Preface to Historia Francorum (C.AD 575)¹

日耳曼人入侵之后，西欧的历史就是征服部落建立的王国如何演变为各自独立的国家的故事。人们所说的拉丁语方言差异日益扩大，随着道路系统的衰败和远离城市的公共秩序难以维护，远距离旅行也变得不再普遍。罗马军队不再拥有共同的传统，士兵也不再能够随时被调往任何地方。在识字能力得以保留的地方，主要是在教会中，拉丁文书写得以延续。但这不足以维持口语标准。口语和书面语之间的鸿沟越来越大，但人们却对此浑然不觉，即口语正在发生变化。拉丁语拼写逐渐变得越来越不规则、越来越怪异：但这种晦涩难懂的状况是可以接受的，甚至是可取的，因为读写能力仅限于少数精英，主要是神职人员和律师。

The history of western Europe after the German invasions is the tale of how the kingdoms established by the conquering tribes went on to become distinct nations. Dialectal differences in the Latin that people spoke widened, and wide-ranging travel became less common, as the road system decayed and public order became unenforceable far from cities. No longer was there a Roman army with a common tradition, and troops that might expect to be transferred anywhere. Where literacy survived, principally in the Church, so did written Latin. But this was not enough to maintain any spoken standard. The gap between spoken and written language widened, but without people having any sense of what was really happening, namely that the spoken language was changing. Little by little Latin spelling came to seem more and more irregular and perverse: but this obscurity was acceptable, even desirable, as reading and writing were the preserve of a small elite, mostly clerics and lawyers.

公元第一个千年后半叶，这段时期为我们提供了西欧基督教传统中一种通用语言衰落的主要证据。当人们虽然仍在使用它，却逐渐忽视其广阔的适用范围，并将重心放在各自的社群中时，这种语言的命运便会发生怎样的变化。在哥特人和日耳曼人瓜分帝国领土三百年后，西班牙、法国和意大利的人们即便相遇，也很难听懂彼此的语言。只有学者——他们才意识到这个问题——才开始将任何人的日常用语称为“ idioma” （习语），以此来与“grammatica”（语法）的普遍性形成对比。 ^“ grammatica ”是中世纪拉丁语的常用词。

This period, the second half of the first millennium AD, gives us our main evidence of what happens to a universal language in the western European, Christian, tradition, when it begins to lose currency, when people, although still speaking it, begin to lose sight of its vast scope, and live above all in their local communities. Three hundred years after the Goths and Germans had divided up the territories of the empire, it had become extremely difficult for the people of Spain, France and Italy, when they did meet, to understand one another’s speech. The learned, the only ones who would be conscious of the problem, came to call anyone’s ordinary speech an idioma, to be contrasted with the universality of grammatica, which was the normal word for Latin in the Middle Ages.^*

公元8世纪查理曼时代的欧洲

Charlemagne’s Europe, 8th Century AD

从五世纪初到八世纪中叶，西欧的权力几经更迭，使得一种观念逐渐形成：普世的王国或公民身份永远不可能存在。然而，从八世纪末开始，法兰克国王与教皇结盟，势力日益壮大，法国、西德和意大利大部分地区在长达一个世纪的时间里实现了统一。统治法兰克帝国鼎盛时期的国王是查理曼大帝，他于768年至814年在位。查理曼的雄心壮志不仅体现在政治上，也体现在文化上。781年，他邀请约克大教堂学校的校长阿尔昆担任其首都亚琛新学院的院长。这一学院的成果被称为加洛林文艺复兴。在这一时期，阿尔昆除了进行其他诸多教育改革外，还制定了拉丁语拼写和发音的新^标准。

From the early fifth to the mid-eighth centuries, the powers in western Europe shifted from generation to generation, allowing the idea to establish itself that universal kingdoms or citizenships could never be of this world. But then, from the late eighth century, the power of the Frankish king grew, in alliance with the papacy, and for a century the areas of France, western Germany and most of Italy were united. The Frankish king who presided over the height of this glory was Charlemagne, who reigned from 768 to 814. His aspirations were cultural as well as political. In 781 he invited Alcuin, the head of the cathedral school at York, to become head of a new academy of scholars at Aachen, his capital. The fruit of this congregation has become known as the Carolingian Renaissance. In the course of it, and along with many other reforms in education, Alcuin established new standards for the spelling^† and pronunciation of Latin.

阿尔昆作为一名讲北方英语的人，将拉丁语视为一门外语，需要从零开始通过书籍学习；在这一点上，他或许与亚琛的大多数学者不谋而合，他们中的许多人来自查理曼帝国的德语区东部。他成功地为拉丁语确立了一种通用发音，接近于我们今天所说的“现代发音”，这是一种巧妙的尝试，旨在根据古代的真实模式重建拉丁语的发音；正如他为自己的著作所起的标题：

Alcuin, as a speaker of North-Country English, approached Latin as a foreign language, to be learnt ab initio from books; in this he would have been at one with perhaps the majority of the scholars at Aachen, many of whom would have come from the German-speaking east of Charlemagne’s empire. He succeeded in establishing a common pronunciation for Latin, close to what we now think of as ‘the modern pronunciation’, which was an intelligent attempt to reconstruct the sound of the language on an authentic ancient model; as he entitled his work:

Mē Legat anttiquās vult qui prōferre loquēlas;

Mē quī nōn sequitur vult sine lēge loquī。

Mē legat antīquās vult qui prōferre loquēlas;

Mē quī nōn sequitur vult sine lēge loquī.

愿传承古老言辞方式者，请研读我的作品；不愿遵循我者，则妄图不按常理出牌^。2

Let him read me who wishes to carry on the ancient modes of speech; He who does not follow me wishes to speak without law.²

这涉及到一个实际的转变，对罗曼语学者而言影响尤为显著。朗读文本时，他们现在必须有意识地偏离传统的、日常口语化的发音：例如，“ viridiārium ”（果园）一词不能再像他们日常说话时那样读成“verger” ^。³这种实际的转变最终导致了概念上的转变。他们逐渐开始以不同的视角看待这种书面风格：语法不仅是罗曼语使用者自然而然的写作方式，甚至是唯一正确的写作方式；一旦被赋予了独特的发音风格，它就成为了一种独立的语言，正如它对于他们的德语同胞（以及远在海外的英语和爱尔兰语学者）而言一样。

This involved a practical shift which was greatest for the Romance-speaking scholars. When reading out a text, they now had consciously to deviate from their traditional, vernacular pronunciation of the language: for example, viridiārium, ‘orchard’, could no longer come out as verger, as it would when they were speaking naturally.³ The practical shift ultimately led to a conceptual one. Gradually, they began to see this written style differently: grammatica was not just the natural, indeed the only correct, way to write for speakers of a Romance idioma; once given a distinct style of pronunciation, it was a separate language, just as it was for their German-speaking fellow-citizens (and the English- and Irish-speaking scholars across the seas).

当拉丁文作为一种独立的语言（即便当时还算不上外语）确立下来后，人们开始需要将某种方言的发音记录下来。已知最早的例子是842年的斯特拉斯堡誓言。当时，查理曼大帝的孙子路德维希（日耳曼人）和查理（秃头查理）兄弟二人必须在各自的追随者面前宣誓互相支持。然而，由于他们的听众说着不同的语言——德语和罗曼语，情况变得十分复杂。查理曼大帝的另一位孙子尼塔尔德一字不差地记录了他们的誓言，^而罗曼语版本是现存最早的罗曼语而非拉丁语文本。看来，这些誓言是在宣誓之前就被记录下来的。当时，除了规范的拉丁语之外，其他任何语言都被记录下来是非常罕见的。对此，人们推测，其目的是为了给兄弟二人提供一份提示。⁵当然，任何一位罗曼语使用者都可以用普通民众能够理解的发音朗读拉丁文文本：他只需用拉丁文文本所对应的白话词汇即可。但如果让一位德语使用者来做这件事，情况就截然不同了。因此，路德维希被提供了相当于九世纪提词器的工具。

Once written Latin had become established as a distinct, if not yet foreign, language, occasions began to arise when there was a need to write down something that would explicitly record the sounds of a vernacular. The earliest known example of this is the so-called Strasburg Oaths of 842, when two brothers, Ludwig the German and Charles the Bald, grandsons of Charlemagne, had to swear to support each other in the hearing of their respective followers, but in a situation complicated by the fact that their audiences spoke different languages, German and Romance. Their words have been recorded for us verbatim by Nithard, yet another grandson of Charlemagne,⁴ and the Romance version provides the first surviving text in Romance rather than Latin. It seems that the texts had been set down before they were uttered. It was highly unusual for anything other than proper Latin to be written down, and to explain it, it is assumed that the purpose was to offer each of the two brothers a crib sheet.⁵ Any Romance speaker could of course read out a Latin text to the common people in a pronunciation that they might understand: he would just come out with the vernacular words suggested by the Latin text. But it was a very different matter if a German speaker were to be asked to do this. And so Ludwig was offered the ninth-century equivalent of a teleprompter.

开头几句话就会表明，说罗曼语不再仅仅是改变一些常规拉丁语的细节那么简单：

The first few phrases will show that speaking Romance was no longer just a matter of changing a few details of regular Latin:

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di in avant, in Quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in ajudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift… ^*

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d’ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in ajudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift…^*

用标准的拉丁文来说，最接近这个意思的表达莫过于：

In proper Latin, one cannot get much closer to this than:

Pro Dei amore et pro christiano populo et nostro communal salvamento, de hoc die in postum, in Quanto Deus sapientiam et potiam mihi donabit, sic servabo ego hunc meum fratrem Carolum et in adiumento et in re quaque, ut quis iure suum fratrem servare debet…

Pro Dei amore et pro christiano populo et nostro communi salvamento, de hoc die in posterum, in quanto Deus sapientiam et potentiam mihi donabit, sic servabo ego hunc meum fratrem Carolum et in adiumento et in re quaque, ut quis iure suum fratrem servare debet…

书面语和口语之间的过渡需求是阿尔昆改革遗留的主要问题。他提供了一种通用的拉丁语口语和书面语形式，旨在将整个西欧基督教世界的识字者——从多尼戈尔到达尔马提亚——统一起来。但代价是，如今普通的罗曼语教区居民在教堂礼拜中无法听懂神父的讲道；在那个时代，为了确保正统性，不仅礼拜仪式，甚至连布道也往往是朗诵或照本宣科地念拉丁文，而不是即兴发挥。因此，在813年法国中部图尔的宗教会议上，以及847年德国美因茨的宗教会议上，都明确规定了例外情况，以保证民众能够继续理解：“……每个人都应该努力将同样的讲道翻译成简明的罗曼语或德语[ rustcam Romanam linguam aut Thiotiscam ]，以便所有人都能更容易地理解所讲的内容。” ⁶

This need for transition between written and spoken language was the major problem left unsolved by Alcuin’s reforms. He had provided a common spoken and written form of Latin that would unite the literate across western Christendom, from Donegal to Dalmatia. But the cost was that now ordinary Romance parishioners could not understand their own priests during church services; and in this era, to ensure orthodoxy, not only liturgy but even the sermons tended to be recited or read from a written Latin text, rather than delivered extempore. As a result, at the Council of Tours in central France in 813, as at the Council of Mainz in Germany in 847, an explicit exception is made, to guarantee the continued understanding of the people: ‘…And that each should work to transfer the same homilies into plain Romance or German language [rusticam Romanam linguam aut Thiotiscam], so that all can more easily understand what is said.’⁶

文献能够保存千年之久，绝非偶然，因此，当所有重要的记录都以拉丁文保存时，方言的记载寥寥无几也就不足为奇了。西班牙一座修道院的奶酪储藏室清单可以追溯到十世纪末，之所以得以保存，是因为它被潦草地写在一份捐赠文件的背面。 ⁷但在九、十和十一世纪，方言的音标转写通常以片段的形式出现在拉丁文文献中。蒙特卡西诺修道院的土地所有权证明中，有一些用意大利语逐字记录的宣誓证词。罗马圣克莱门特教堂墙上的一幅十一世纪末的壁画，配有生动的文字说明，描绘了一次著名的、徒劳的迫害圣克莱门特的尝试：他的攻击者奇迹般地被迷惑，误以为他是一根柱子。他们的首领向手下喊道：

Preservation of documents for a thousand years tends not to happen without serious intent, and so not surprisingly there is little record of the vernacular languages when all the serious records were still being kept in Latin. There is a cheese-larder list from a Spanish monastery datable to the late tenth century, preserved because it had been scribbled on the back of a document of donation.⁷ But in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, phonetic transcriptions of vernacular languages are usually found as little snippets in Latin documents. There are verbatim statements in Italian, recorded as sworn, to validate ownership for lands belonging to Montecassino monasteries. There is a vivid caption to a fresco on the wall of St Clement’s church in Rome from the late eleventh century, illustrating a famous but futile attempt at persecution of St Clement, when his attackers were miraculously deluded into mistaking him for a column. Their leader shouts to his men:

Filli delle pute，叛徒。戈斯马里，艾伯特，叛徒。 Fàlite dereto colo palo, 卡文塞尔

Filli delle pute, traite. Gosmari, Albertel, traite. Fàlite dereto colo palo, Carvoncelle

婊子养的，拉！戈斯马里奥，阿尔贝泰洛，拉！用棍子推回去，卡沃切洛！

Sons of whores, pull! Gosmario, Albertello, pull! Push back with the stick, Carvoncello!

圣人用（语法错误的）拉丁语评论道：

while the saint comments in (ungrammatical) Latin:

杜里蒂姆·科迪斯·维斯特里斯·萨克斯·特拉尔·梅鲁伊斯蒂斯

Duritiam cordis vestris saxa traere meruistis

你铁石心肠，这是你应得的。

Hardness of heart yours rocks to pull you have deserved.

只有当严肃的文学作品开始用方言出现，侵入书面语言的传统领地时，“乡土”语言的真正地位才开始显现。而这一切首先发生在罗曼语世界的另一端——诺曼底和英格兰。在那里，诺曼人开始记录他们从吟游诗人那里听到的民谣和歌谣。《罗兰之歌》（Chanson de Roland）创作于11世纪晚期，是这些作品中最古老、最优秀的一部，讲述了查理曼大帝时期一场英勇的后卫战役，对抗摩尔人。该歌最后一行署名：

Only when serious works of literature started to appear in the vernacular, invading the traditional ground held by the written language, did the real status of the ‘rustic’ languages begin to become clear. And this happened first at the other end of the Romance-speaking world, in Normandy and England, where the Normans started writing down ballads and lays of the kind that they heard the minstrels sing. The Chanson de Roland, from the late eleventh century, is the oldest and best of these works, telling the tale of a heroic rearguard action fought against the Moors in the time of Charlemagne. It is signed in its last line:

Turoldus 拒绝了

Ci falt la geste que Turoldus declinet

图罗尔杜斯复述的冒险故事到此结束。

Here ends the adventure that Turoldus retold

似乎没有理由不将这位图罗尔德与贝叶挂毯中出现的、向征服者威廉传递信息的特别命名的人物联系起来。

and there seems no reason not to identify this Turold with a specially named character who appears in the Bayeux Tapestry, delivering a message to William the Conqueror.

十二、十三世纪，罗曼语族诗歌开始在西欧各地流传，包括普罗旺斯、法国北部、加利西亚、卡斯蒂利亚、加泰罗尼亚以及意大利。这一突破出现在拉丁语从未占据主导地位的地区，体现在对宫廷爱情的颂扬中——现代意义上的“浪漫”并非偶然——以及对骑士精神和战争英雄故事的描绘中。拉丁语逐渐被剥离出来，成为修道院、学校和大学的学术语言。

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, poetry in the Romance languages begins to be written down all over western Europe, in Provence, in northern France, in Galicia, Castile and Catalonia, and in Italy. The breakthrough came in areas that Latin had never strongly represented, in the celebration of courtly love—the modern sense of the word ‘romance’ is no coincidence—and in heroic tales of chivalry and war. Latin was increasingly hived off as a learned language for monasteries, schools and universities.

提出这些语言学新发展的首位理论家正是意大利著名诗人但丁·阿利吉耶里（1265-1321）。在他的《论通俗雄辩》（De vulgari eloquentia）一书中，他指出拉丁语（Grammatica）本质上是罗曼语族古老形式的遗存^。

The first theorist of these new linguistic developments is none other than the leading Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, who lived from 1265 to 1321. In his De vulgari eloquentia he recognised that Latin, grammatica, was in essence the preserved older form of the Romance languages.^*

他似乎很难说服听众，这些祖先差异是逐渐变化的必然结果，就像五个世纪后达尔文在不同的课题和时间尺度上发现的那样。

He seems to have had as much difficulty in convincing his audience that these ancestral differences were the predictable result of gradual change as Darwin was to find, with a different subject matter and timescale, five centuries later.

我们所说的，也不应该比看到一个年轻人长大成人更奇怪，因为我们并没有亲眼见证他的成长过程：因为渐进的变化我们根本无法察觉，而事物变化需要的时间越长，我们就越认为它稳定。所以，如果那些与野兽相差无几的人认为某个城市一直使用同一种语言，我们也不必感到惊讶，因为城市语言的变化只能在漫长的时间里逐渐发生，而人的生命本身又非常短暂。因此，如果一个民族的语言如前所述，随着时间的推移而不断变化，并且不可能保持不变，那么它必然会以各种方式发生变化，而这些变化与保持不变的部分完全独立，正如习俗和服饰会以各种方式变化一样，这些变化既非自然也非社会所决定，而是出于人类的喜好和地方风俗。这正是语法学发明者的动机：因为语法学无非就是语言在不同时间和地点保持不变的同一性^。8

Nor should what we say appear any more strange than to see a young person grown up, whom we do not see grow up: for what moves gradually is not at all recognized by us, and the longer something needs for its change to be recognized the more stable we think it is. So we are not surprised if the opinion of men, who are little distant from brutes, is that a given city has existed always with the same language, since the change in language in a city happens gradually only over a very long succession of time, and the life of men is also, by its very nature, very short. Therefore if over one people the language changes, as has been said, successively over time, and can in no way stand still, it is necessary that it should vary in various ways quite separately from what remains constant, just as customs and dress vary in various ways, which are confirmed neither by nature or society, but arise at human pleasure and to local taste. This was the motive of the inventors of the faculty of grammatica: for grammatica is nothing but the identity of speech unalterable for diverse times and places.⁸

除了这部拉丁文作品外，但丁还用意大利语写了另一部作品，即《飨宴》（ Convivio），它并非诗歌，而是一部散文作品，旨在阐释他早期的一些诗歌，同时也向不懂拉丁文的人传授知识：“我写作的动机是害怕名誉扫地，也是渴望传授他人无法真正传授的教诲。” ⁹

Besides this work in Latin, Dante wrote another one, the Convivio or ‘Banquet’, in Italian—not a poem, but a prose work aimed at explaining some of his earlier poems, but at the same time educating people who could not read Latin: ‘I was motivated by the fear of infamy, and I was motivated by the desire to give teaching such as others truly cannot.’⁹

这标志着拉丁语对学术信息的垄断地位开始走向终结。从此以后，任何话语领域或语言功能都不再属于它。拉丁语，这种语法书的语言，曾经被认为是永恒的，如今却被认为是人为的，它面临着来自致力于书面表达的口语语言日益激烈的竞争。它开始走向衰亡。

This was the beginning of the end of Latin’s monopoly on learned information. Henceforth, there would be no field of discourse or function of speech reserved for it. Latin, the language of the grammar books, once felt to be eternal but now recognised as artificial, faced ever increasing competition from spoken languages being committed to writing. It began to die.

^* “idioma”一词是从希腊语“idíōma” （意为“特性”）借入拉丁语的，而“grammatica”当然是学校里每个人学习拉丁语的科目名称。

^* The word idioma was a borrowing into Latin from Greek idíōma, ‘peculiarity’, while grammatica was of course the name of the school subject in which everyone learnt their Latin,

^†阿尔昆确立了大小写字母之间的系统区别，这一区别在罗马字母（如本书中使用的英文）中一直沿用至今。

^† It was Alcuin who instituted the systematic difference between capital and lower-case letters, which has lasted in Roman scripts (such as the English used in this book) to this day.

^为了上帝的爱、基督徒的福祉以及我们共同的救赎，从今以后，只要上帝赐予我知识和力量，我必将尽我所能，在各方面帮助我的兄弟查尔斯，如同一个义人应该保护他的兄弟一样……

^* For God’s love and the Christian people and our common salvation, from this day forward, insofar as God gives me knowledge and power, I shall so keep this my brother Charles both in aid and in every thing as when a man in right his brother should keep…

^*但丁（ De vulgari eloquentia，viii.l）将希腊语与日耳曼语系以及罗曼语区分开来。他的标准（日耳曼语中表示“是”的单词jo）倾向于将罗曼语言至少分为三组（ oc、oil、sì），但他指出它们有大量共同的基本词汇： “quia multa per eadem vocabula nominare videntur、ut Deum、caelum、amorem、mare、terram、est、vivit、moritur、amat、alia”费雷奥尼亚'； “因为他们似乎用相同的词来命名许多事物：上帝、天空、爱、海洋、地球、存在、生命、死亡、爱，以及几乎所有其他事物。”

令人惊讶的是，但丁认为oc标志着西班牙浪漫，而不是法国南部的普罗旺斯（无论如何都称为 Langue d'oc）。或许他受到了普罗旺斯语与加泰罗尼亚语相似性的影响。

^* Dante (De vulgari eloquentia, viii.l) distinguishes Greek from the Germanic languages, and also from the Romance. His criterion (the word for ‘yes’—jo in Germanic) would tend to split up the Romance languages into at least three groups (oc, oil, sì), but he notes that they have a large amount of basic vocabulary in common: ’quia multa per eadem vocabula nominare videntur, ut Deum, caelum, amorem, mare, terram, est, vivit, moritur, amat, alia fere omnia’; ‘because they seem to name many things with the same words: God, sky, love, sea, earth, is, lives, dies, loves, and almost everything else.’

Surprisingly, Dante sees oc as marking Spanish Romance, not the Provençal of southern France (known anyway as Langue d’oc). Perhaps he was affected by Provençal’s similarity to Catalan.

第三部分：海上语言

PART III: LANGUAGES BY SEA

谁又能预知，在某个时刻，我们会将

我们语言的宝藏倾注于何处

？我们最辉煌的成果将被送往何方？去往哪些陌生的海岸？

去用我们的语言丰富那些懵懂的民族？

在尚未成形的西方世界，

又会有哪些地方被我们独特的口音所润色？

And who, in time, knows whither we may vent

The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores

This gain of our best glory shall be sent,

To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?

What worlds in the yet unformèd Occident

May come refined with accents that are ours?

出自塞缪尔·丹尼尔，《穆索菲勒斯》（1599 年）

from Samuel Daniel, Musophilus (1599)

大卫：有什么消息？你没听说有船要来了吗？

DAVID: What newes? haue you heard nothing of the coming of any ship?

亚伯拉罕：我听见了隆隆的炮声，这是船只到来的信号。D

：我还听说有一艘船从吉塞拉来。

ABRAHAM: I heard the thundering of Ordnance, which is a signe of ships coming.

D.: And I heard that a shippe was come from Guiserat.

问：她带来了什么货物？

答：她带回了大米、杏仁和芥菜籽，还有各种各样的衣服，以及大量的棉布。

问：真是这样吗？这消息真是令人振奋。

答：我听到的都是真的。

A.: And what Marchandizes doth she bring?

D.: She is laden with rice, almonds and raysons, she bringeth also many cloathes of all sortes, and very much bombace.

A.: Is this so? surely this news is very much desired.

D.: I heard it so affirmed for a truth.

DAOEDT：Appa ach gabar？ tida ga-barbarou derribarang cappal？

DAOEDT: Appa ach gabar? tieda ga-barbarou derribarang cappal?

易卜拉欣：Souda beta denga'r boenij bedil，iang itoe alamat derri cappal dagang。

EBRAHIM: Souda beta denga’r boenij bedil, iang itoe alamat derri cappal dagang.

D.：Lagihamba deng'ar catta iang satoe cappal derri Guiserat souda datan。

D.: Lagihamba deng’ar catta iang satoe cappal derri Guiserat souda datan.

E.：Appa peruiniága debaua dia？

E.: Appa peruiniága debaua dia?

D.：Ini ber'isi、ken bras、ken gorma、zebibt； lagi bauadia bania káyin alus derri samoe' aieni: lagicapas bania。

D.: Ini ber’isi, ken bras, ken gorma, zebibt; lagi bauadia bania káyin alus derri samoe’ aieni: lagicapas bania.

E.：贝吉图？伊托·加巴尔·巴尼亚·拜克。

E.: Begitou? itoe gabar bania baick.

D.：Ia beta den'ar catta sach begitoe。

D.: Ia beta deng’ar catta sach begitoe.

奥古斯丁·斯波尔丁，《英语和马来语对话录》，1614年，第1-2^页。

Augustine Spaulding, Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages, 1614, pp. 1-2¹

9

拉丁语的第二次死亡

9

The Second Death of Latin

西欧人发现他们的船只可以跨越重洋，直达遥远的土地，无论是为了贸易还是为了征服和剥削，这一发现开启了全球语言传播史的新纪元。然而，欧洲船只抵达的目的地，其语言社群往往无力对这些冒险的入侵者发起有效的军事或政治抵抗。一旦发生这种情况，受害者往往遭受重创，并被迫臣服于新的精英阶层。新精英阶层的统治使得语言的传播比以往任何时候都更加广泛。如今，世界十大语言中仍有六种殖民语言位列其中，便足以证明这一历史进程的后果^。

The discovery by the western Europeans that their ships could cross oceans, and bring them directly to distant lands, whether for trade or outright conquest and exploitation, opens a new era in the global history of language spread. All too often, the language communities at the destinations of European shipping proved unable to mount effective military, or political, resistance to the adventuring invaders. When this happened, the victims were frequently decimated, and always forced to submit to a new elite. The spread of languages through the dominance of the new elites was far more pervasive than anything that had been seen before. The results are evident today in the presence of six colonising languages in the list of the world’s top ten languages by population.^*

正如我们刚才所见，这些殖民语言中的罗曼语族之所以存在，完全归功于罗马帝国西部地区被日耳曼人征服后发生的变革；相互理解能力的下降，以及拉丁语（或称语法拉丁语）的重新定义——不再仅仅是它们的书面形式，而是一种独立于它们的语言——导致了它们发展成为另一种社群的载体。这个社群^的知识分子地位较低，但在文化上往往与教会一样丰富，因为教会仍然依赖拉丁语的口语和书面语。

The Romance half of these colonising languages, as we have just seen, owed their very existence to the changes that came over the Roman empire after its western regions were dissolved by the Germanic conquests; the decline in mutual intelligibility, and the redefinition of Latin or grammatica, to be no longer just their written form but a language separate from them, had led to their development as vehicles of a different sort of community. This community was less intellectual, but often as rich culturally as the Church, which continued to rely on Latin, spoken and written.¹

然而，在这些语言开始在全球范围内加速传播之前，出现了一个划时代的事件，它强调并强化了西欧识字率的普及。它扩大了拉丁语与包括罗曼语族在内的各种方言之间的竞争范围，并极大地提高了这场竞争的赌注。其结果是拉丁语作为西方基督教世界通用语的地位被取代：实际上，在两千年的历史之后，它作为一种真正意义上的交流和创新语言的地位就此消亡。

Yet before these languages began their accelerated progress round the world, there came an epoch-making development, which emphasised and reinforced the spread of literacy in western Europe. It widened the range of competition between Latin and the vernacular languages, including the Romance ones, and massively raised the stakes in the contest. The result was the dethronement of Latin as the lingua franca of western Christendom: in effect its death, after two millennia, as a language of any real communication and innovation.

这一事件标志着印刷书籍大众市场的兴起。如同信息革命在我们这个时代重塑世界一样，它本质上是新技术传播带来的经济影响。约翰内斯·古腾堡于1450年在美因茨出版了他的《圣经》版本。很快，出版社如雨后春笋般在欧洲各地涌现，到1475年，大多数拉丁文经典著作都已印刷出版。到^{1500年，印刷书籍的产量已达2000万册，据估计，}^当时西欧平均每五个人就拥有一本书。

The event was the rise of a mass market in printed books. Like the information revolution reorganising the world in our own time, it was in essence the economic effect of the spread of a new technology. Johannes Gutenberg published his edition of the Bible in Mainz in 1450. Very soon, publishing houses sprang up all over Europe, and by 1475 most of the classic works in Latin were available in print.² By 1500, 20 million printed volumes had been produced, estimated to correspond to one book for every five people in western Europe.³

^{几乎与此同时，宗教改革爆发，反对罗马教皇所确立的基督教的基督教新教教会兴起。这当然并非巧合，而是标志着新的书籍出版革命打破了此前严密把控的传播媒介渠道。马丁·路德的著作，从1517年钉在维滕贝格教堂大门上的九十五条论纲开始，以戏剧化的方式传播开来，随后被翻译成德语印刷发行。不久之后，他的整本圣经译本也问世了。16}世纪20年代和30年代，德语出版社的产量是此前二十年总产量的三倍；1517年至1525年间，路德的著作占所有德语出版物的33%。

Almost at once comes the Reformation, and the rise of Protestant churches opposed to the established Christianity of the Pope in Rome. This, of course, was no coincidence, but a sign that the new book-publishing revolution had broken open the previously well-guarded access to media of communication. Martin Luther’s works, starting theatrically with his ninety-five theses nailed to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, were printed and distributed in German translation. His translation of the whole Bible soon followed. The output of German-language publishing houses over the 1520s and 1530s was three times the total of the previous twenty years; Luther’s works accounted for 33 per cent of all German-language publications between 1517 and 1525.⁴

未经筛选的新信息浪潮令一些人难以承受。1535年，法国国王弗朗索瓦一世曾短暂地宣布，印刷任何书籍都属于死罪，但这一举措并未产生实际效果。梵蒂冈则更为谨慎，于1559年设立了《禁书目录》（Index Librorum Prohibitorum）。然而，信息洪流并未就此止步。其重要影响在于，长距离、高层次的交流渠道正从宫廷和大学中通过手稿传递的口头传播，转向大规模印刷文本的书面传播。拉丁语作为旧式交流媒介的主导地位依然存在，但在海量信息的冲击下，它也让位于新的语言。书籍可以用拉丁语或其他任何语言印刷，而那些用拉丁语撰写的书籍，由于使用了国际通用语言，其发行量自然会更大。但图书贸易的经济规律最终淘汰了它们，腾出了书架空间，让用地方语言编写的书籍能够更靠近产地，从而获得更大的销量^。5

The tide of new, unfiltered, information was too much for some. In France in 1535, King François I—briefly, and without effect—declared the printing of any books at all a capital offence. The Vatican, more circumspectly, set up the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, first so named in 1559. But the flow was not stemmed. The important effect was that the channels of long-distance and high-level discourse were switching from oral diffusion at court and university, mediated through manuscript messages, to written distribution of mass-produced texts. Latin had retained its domination as the vehicle of the old-style communications, but under the weight of sheer volume it now yielded to the new. Books might be printed in Latin as well as any other language, and those that were might be expected to enjoy a wider circulation for being written in an international language; but the economics of the book trade remaindered them, clearing its shelves for books in vernacular languages, which would sell in large quantities nearer to the point of production.⁵

当时的情况是西欧民族国家权力日益增长的一个方面：原本为不同君主政府提供共同背景的国际知识精英，被一个更加活跃且影响力更大的资产阶级所取代。资产阶级掌控了地方君主制，并使其为自身更世俗的目标服务。这在语言学上的影响之一，就是拉丁语被民族方言所取代，这种转变不仅体现在地方层面，甚至在最新的学术研究领域也同样如此。

What was happening was one facet of the growing power of the nation-state in western Europe: the replacement of an international intellectual elite, which provided a common background for different kings’ governments, by a much more vocal and influential bourgeoisie, taking control of their local monarchies and making them serve their more worldly purposes. One linguistic effect of this was to replace Latin with national vernaculars, not just for local purposes but even at the level of the latest research.

理论上，拉丁语仍然是进行高水平学术讨论的更佳载体：作为一种语言，它拥有丰富的词汇，这些词汇是经过一千多年的思想和辩论积累而成的；作为一个社群，它拥有广泛的影响力，因为西欧各地的学者都习惯于用拉丁语进行交流、思考和写作。相比之下，每一种方言都必须从小得多的基础开始，一点一点地积累起同等的实力。

Latin remained, in theory, a superior vehicle for high-level intellectual discourse: as a language, it had the vocabulary, built up over more than a thousand years of thought and disputation; and as a community, it had the reach, since scholars from all over the west of Europe were accustomed to talking, thinking and writing in it. Each vernacular, by contrast, had to build up equivalent strengths little by little from a much smaller base.

但无论哪里发生骚乱或集市，方言都凭借其数量优势占据主导地位；十六、十七世纪的宗教争论和战争表明，思想问题与辩论或王朝冲突一样，都容易引发销售热潮、骚乱和内战。直到二十世纪，传播媒介才得以深入渗透，使一种国际语言能够有效地与街头方言竞争。现代英语在广播中找到了应对中世纪拉丁语书籍出版业所构成威胁的答案。

But wherever there was a riot, or a market, the vernaculars had the force of numbers on their side; and the religious controversies and wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries showed that intellectual issues were as apt to generate sales booms, riots and civil wars as disputations or dynastic conflicts. It was not until the twentieth century that communications media could penetrate deeply enough for an international language to compete effectively with vernaculars on the street. Modern English has found in broadcasting the answer to the threat that book publishing posed for medieval Latin.

以拉丁语进行的学术生活逐渐衰落，大约持续了一个世纪。弗朗西斯·培根于1605年出版了英文著作《学术的进步》，他希望将其翻译成拉丁文，“敲响警钟，召集其他智者……让这警钟传遍四方”。然而，直到1623年，该书的拉丁文版才最终面世。当时培根写道：“因为这些现代语言迟早会像破产者一样挥霍书籍；既然我已经在这个时代浪费了太多时间，我愿上帝允许我与后世一同弥补这些损失。”

Intellectual life conducted in Latin gradually fell away. It took about a century to go. Francis Bacon, publishing his Advancement of Learning in English in 1605, wanted to have it translated into Latin ‘to ring a bell to call other wits together … and have that bell heard as far as can be’. It did not actually come out in Latin until 1623, when he remarked: ‘For these modern languages will at one time or another play the bank-rowtes [bankrupts] with books; and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad as God shall give me leave to recover it with posterity.’

英国最后一部以拉丁文出版的重要学术著作是牛顿于1687年出版的《自然哲学的数学原理》。自那以后，科学研究总体上不得不以多种语言进行，这无疑增加了研究的便利性。这是现代世界为使科学家和知识分子与广大社会保持更紧密联系而付出的代价。^*

The last major intellectual work in England to be published in Latin was Newton’s Principia in 1687. Since then, science has in general had to be conducted less conveniently, in a variety of languages. It is the price the modern world has paid to keep scientists and intellectuals more closely in touch with society at large.^*

拉丁语的第二次消亡比第一次更为深刻。它不同于五百年前的白话文运动，当时拉丁语只是失去了作为罗曼语族书面伪装的用途。罗曼语族在语音和结构上早已与拉丁语分道扬镳；试图通过拉丁语的外衣来理解它们，既费力又徒劳。但即便拉丁语让位于白话文学，它仍然保留着重要的用途：它仍然是超越罗曼语族所创作（和欣赏）的流行主题的理性论述的载体。而现在，拉丁语彻底停止了在任何新的思考中使用。

This second death was more profound than Latin’s first. It was not like the vernacular movements of five hundred years before, when Latin had just lost its use as a written disguise for Romance languages. They had moved on from Latin, and apart, in phonetics and structure; trying to access in written form through a Latin overlay was hard work, and increasingly pointless. But even as it made way for vernacular literature, Latin had retained a significant use: it was still the vehicle for the intellectual discourse that went beyond the popular themes being produced (and appreciated) in Romance. Now, Latin was ceasing to be used in any new thinking at all.

将拉丁语的最后阶段与希腊语、汉语和梵语等其他古典语言进行比较，会很有启发意义。毕竟，这些语言都代表了足够大的区域内统一的语言理想，而这些区域又足以分裂成许多流行的变体。但最终只有拉丁语被其衍生语言所基本取代。

It is revealing to compare the final stages in the life of Latin with those of its fellow classic languages, Greek, Chinese and Sanskrit. Each of these languages, after all, represented the unitary linguistic ideals of an area large enough to split into a number of popular varieties. But only Latin ended up largely replaced by the set of its daughter languages.

希腊语在其传播的地区从未扎根；当这些地区被其他民族征服，希腊人不再是统治精英时，希腊语也基本上在这些地区失传了。结果是，希腊语最终局限于一个相对较小的区域，主要由一个专制政府统治。在拉丁语，尤其是土耳其语征服之后，该政府权力削弱直至不复存在，维系希腊语统一的古典规范也随之瓦解；但当单一制政府恢复后，人们逐渐发现有可能建立一个适用于整个希腊语的新的统一标准。

Greek never put down deep roots in the regions to which it spread; and when these regions were conquered by others, so that Greeks ceased to be their governing elite, Greek was essentially lost in them. The result was that Greek ended up confined to a relatively small region, mostly under a single, authoritarian government. When the government was reduced in power and then ceased to exist, after the Latin and especially the Turkish conquests, the classical norms that had kept the language united were weakened; but when unitary government was returned, it proved possible, gradually, to move to a new, single, standard for the whole language.

汉语在所有使用相关方言（或称衍生语言）的社群中，依然保持着其在政治和思想层面的高层中心地位。与希腊语不同，汉语在其东南各省失去了语言上的统一性；但其政治统一性总体上依然稳固。汉语书写系统的语音模糊性在一定程度上使其能够忽略其标准语核心与方言之间逐渐出现的差异。正是这种模糊性，使得汉语在上个世纪能够将其语言规范从古典文言转向北京白话，而没有失去所有汉语社群的拥护。因此，表意文字系统使汉语免于“第一次消亡”，但同时也未能阻止其衍生语言的分化。

Chinese has retained its role as the high-level focus, political and intellectual, for all the communities that speak related dialects (or daughter languages). Unlike Greek, it has lost linguistic unity, all over its south-eastern provinces; but political unity by and large has held firm. The phonetic inexplicitness of its writing system has, to an extent, allowed it to ignore emergent differences between its standard core and those dialects. This same ambiguity has enabled it, in the last century, to switch its linguistic norm from classical wényán to Beijing báihuà without losing the allegiance of the whole set of Chinese-speaking communities. The logographic writing system, then, has enabled Chinese to escape the ‘first death’, without preventing numbers of its daughter languages from diverging.

梵语如同拉丁语一样，衍生出（或与）了许多后裔语言；这标志着梵语和拉丁语历史的一个主要共同特征，即其语言区域长期以来政治统一性的瓦解。因此，梵语经历了我们所说的拉丁语的“第一次消亡”。与拉丁语的情况类似，这导致其后裔语言发展成为独立的文学语言，并用于表达通俗主题。但梵语长期以来一直保持着其作为高雅知识中心，以及某种意义上的语言理想地位，成为这些独立语言的典范。尽管英语从海外传入，削弱了梵语的高雅世俗地位，但它作为大多数印度人的核心宗教载体，从未被取代。

Sanskrit, like Latin, has given rise to (or been closely associated with) a number of daughter languages; this marks the major common feature of its history and Latin’s, namely the breakdown of political unity over its speech area for a long time. As such Sanskrit shared what we have called the ‘first death’ of Latin. As in the case of Latin, this led to the daughter languages establishing themselves as independent literary languages for popular themes. But it long retained its role as high-level intellectual centre, and hence in some sense linguistic ideal, for these independent languages. Despite the impact of English from overseas, eliminating its high-level secular role, it has never been replaced as the focal religious vehicle for the majority of Indians.

这段历史的下一个篇章是拉丁语衍生语言的惊人传播；我们很快就会谈到这一点。毕竟，这才是拉丁语社群真正且持续发展的故事。然而，从某种意义上说，拉丁语作为一种鲜活的语言，确实找到了新的面貌。

The next tale in this history is the phenomenal spread of Latin’s daughter languages; to this we shall very soon pass. This, after all, is the real, continuing, story of the Latin speech community. And yet, in a way, Latin as a living language did find a new disguise.

十三至十五世纪，随着君士坦丁堡及其帝国陷落后拜占庭学者的涌入，西欧因对古希腊语和拉丁语有了更直接、更深入的了解而蒙受启迪。一千年来，西方人首次开始具备阅读希腊语的能力，并如饥似渴地吸收了与之相关的阿提卡主义文体学说（参见第六章“中年危机：尝试新的开始”，第254页）。或许是由于接触，或许是由于自觉的古典学研究的性质，许多人开始对自己的拉丁语产生一种相应的语言学优越感，一心想要追溯到最古老的文献。在他们看来，只有西塞罗的著作才算得上合格。并非所有人文主义者都沉迷于此：尤其是十六世纪初才华横溢的荷兰古典学家伊拉斯谟，他创作了《西塞罗对话录》来讽刺这种追求。书中虚构了一个名叫诺索波努斯（意为“身患疾病”）的人物，他竭尽全力地研究西塞罗著作中每个动词的哪些词形变化确实出现过，哪些（更重要的是）没有出现过。对于这样一个人来说，就连他的梦境也仅限于西塞罗（“Nec aliud simulachrum in somnis occurrit praeterquam Ciceronis…”）；天真的目击者希波洛格斯评论说，他看起来更像个鬼魂而不是人（“Larvae similior videtur quam homini”）。

In the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, western Europe had been enlightened by a new and more direct knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin, aided by the influx of Byzantine scholars after the fall of Constantinople and its empire. Westerners began for the first time in a thousand years to have a reading knowledge of Greek, and eagerly lapped up the associated stylistic doctrines of Atticism (see Chapter 6, ‘Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning’, p. 254). Perhaps by contact, perhaps because of the nature of self-consciously classical studies, many began to develop a corresponding linguistic snobbery about their Latin, wanting to go back to the most ancient sources. Only Cicero’s work would do. Not all humanists caught this bug: in particular Erasmus, a witty Dutch classicist writing in the early sixteenth century, wrote a Dialogus Ciceronianus to satirise the aspiration, envisioning a character called Nosoponus (’labouring under a disease’) exerting himself to work out which inflected forms of each verb were actually found in Cicero’s work, and which (more importantly) were not. For such a man, even his dreams were restricted to Cicero (’Nec aliud simulachrum in somnis occurrit praeterquam Ciceronis…’); the naive witness Hypologus comments that he looks more like a ghost than a man (’Larvae similior videtur quam homini’).

当这种对表达细节的执着被视为一种值得尊重的风尚时，人们便开始认为表达风格远比内容重要，对既有言论的了解远比创新和追求进步的能力更为重要。因此，正如西方希腊学者最高的追求是阅读原文（或许还会模仿——但只能是古典风格）一样，如今人们开始认为，只要他们为了自身利益而精通拉丁语及其现存的早期文学，就能维护拉丁语的价值。语言的根本用途——思考和感受、表达和交流思想——完全屈从于这种“古典主义” ^。

When this kind of devotion to the details of expression established itself as respectable, it became possible to see the style of expression as far more important than the content, and the knowledge of what had been said as far superior to the ability to innovate and strive for progress. So just as the highest aspiration for Greek scholars in the West was to read the texts (and perhaps write a pastiche—but only in classical style), now people came to think they were preserving the value of Latin if they became experts in the language and its extant early literature, for their own sake alone. The primary uses of a language, to think and feel, to express ideas and to communicate them, became purely subordinate to this ‘classicism’.^*

如果拉丁语学者们能够接受他们最喜爱的诗人之一的无奈结论，那就更好了：

It would have been better if Latinists had accepted the resigned verdict of one of their favourite poets:

Soles occidere et redire possunt：

Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux

Nox est perpetua una dormienda。

Soles occidere et redire possunt:

Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux

Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

太阳会落下，也会再次升起：

对我们来说，当短暂的白昼落下之后，

便会迎来永恒的夜晚，等待着我们入睡。

Suns can set and can come back again:

For us when once the short light has set

There is one night perpetual to be slept.

卡图卢斯

Catullus

^*参见第十三章。这六个国家分别是英国、西班牙、俄罗斯、葡萄牙、德国和法国。还有第七个国家，荷兰，其人口排名第21位。它们的帝国历史在第十、十一和十二章中有所回顾。

^* See Chapter 13. The six are English, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, German and French. There was a seventh, Dutch, which holds position 21 in the population league. Their imperial careers are reviewed in Chapters 10, 11 and 12.

^*与此形成鲜明对比的是阿尔昆，他在九世纪推广他的拉丁语新标准，其工作方向完全相反：因为当时的重要使命是让知识界重新与自身及其古老的传统建立联系。

^* Contrast Alcuin, propagating his new standard for Latin in the ninth century, and working in quite the opposite direction: for the important mission then was to put the intellectual world back in touch with itself, and its own ancient traditions.

^这种怀旧的风气，我在上世纪六十年代就读英国公学古典教育时就已耳熟能详。无数教科书的序言都体现了这一点。例如，艾因格和温特尔（1890年，1963年第17次印刷：iii）写道：“拉丁诗歌创作……是那种无私地热爱古代作家，并乐于用古代韵律和节奏来装点现代思想和现代表达的学术的证明和精华。”再比如，皮姆和西尔弗（1952年），他们声称某一章节“展现了拉丁语在过去两百年间在英国的持续活力”，而该章节的内容不过是墓志铭、几篇提及拉丁文学的（英文）议会演讲、一段教皇通谕、一首（诚然诙谐的）关于1947年燃料危机的诗，以及一些来自学校和牛津大学的玩笑式获奖作品。这本书的书名《活在男人的唇上》本身就是一个极具讽刺意味的谎言，因为它只是对公元前二世纪逝世的恩尼乌斯墓志铭中的一句短语“vivu per ora virŭm”的翻译。

^* This backward-looking spirit is still familiar to me from an education in the classical stream of an English public school in the 1960s. It is expressed in a thousand prefaces to school textbooks. Consider this from Ainger and Wintle (1890, 17th impression 1963: iii): ‘Latin verse composition … is the proof and the flower of that scholarship which loves the old writers with an unselfish love, and delights to clothe modern thoughts and modern expressions in the dress of ancient metre and rhythm.’ Or Pym and Silver (1952), who state that a chapter ‘illustrates the continuing vitality of the Latin language in England during the last two hundred years’ when all it contains is epitaphs, a couple of parliamentary speeches (in English) which allude to Latin literature, a section of a papal encyclical, a poem (admittedly witty) on the fuel crisis of 1947, and a number of jokey prize compositions from schools and the University of Oxford. The book’s very title. Alive on Men’s Lips, is a highly ironic lie, since it is simply a translation of a phrase from the epitaph of Ennius, ’vivu’ per ora virŭm’, dead in the second century BC.

十大

篡位者：西班牙在新世界

10

Usurpers of Greatness: Spanish in the New World

Quando bien comigo pinso mui esclarecida Reina: i pongo deláte los ojos el antiguedad de todas las cosas: que para nuestra recordacion & memoria quedaron escriptas: una cosa hállo & sáco por 结论 mui cierta: que siempre la lengua fue compaõera del imperio: & de tal manera lo siguió: que junta mente començarõ.克雷西埃隆。和弗洛雷西龙。 & despues jŭta fue la caida de entranbos。

Quando bien comigo pienso mui esclarecida Reina: i pongo deláte los ojos el antiguedad de todas las cosas: que para nuestra recordacion & memoria quedaron escriptas: una cosa hállo & sáco por conclusion mui cierta: que siempre la lengua fue compaõera del imperio: & de tal manera lo siguió: que junta mente començarõ. crecieron. & florecieron. & despues jŭta fue la caida de entrambos.

当我仔细思考，最杰出的女王陛下，并将所有留存至今、供我们记录和记忆的古老事物呈现在我眼前时，我发现并得出了一个非常确定的结论：语言始终是帝国的伴侣，它们共同兴起、发展、繁荣；后来，它们也共同衰落。

When I consider well, most illustrious Queen, and set before my eyes the antiquity of all the things which remain written down for our record and memory, one thing I find and draw as a most certain conclusion, that always language was the companion of empire, and followed it in such a way that jointly they began, grew, flourished; and afterwards joint was the fall of both.

安东尼奥·德·内布里哈 (Antonio de Nebrija)，他的《卡斯特拉语言语法》序言的开场白，1492 年

Antonio de Nebrija, opening words of the preface to his Gramatica de la lengua castellana, 1492

征服者的肖像

Portrait of a conquistador

欧洲语言开始在全球传播之际，印刷机和出版商正大力宣扬西班牙语、葡萄牙语、法语、意大利语、英语、荷兰语和德语等方言的存在，而拉丁语则逐渐走向衰落。这些传播的语言来自西罗马帝国的继承国；因此，这些国家受过良好教育的精英阶层对庞大的跨国帝国的理想，乃至浪漫的幻想，并不陌生。他们从小就接触罗马和亚历山大的历史；他们的想象力被骑士精神、征服和异域冒险的故事所充斥，例如阿马迪斯·德·高拉（15世纪一部流行浪漫小说的主人公，该小说于1508年在萨拉戈萨出版）、他的儿子埃斯普兰迪安（1510年出版）以及其他众多人物的故事。^*历史即将让他们的梦想成真。

The beginnings of the global spread of European languages came just as printing presses and publishers were asserting the existence of vernaculars, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, English, Dutch and German, over the body of a Latin that was gradually being drained of life. The languages that spread were those of the successor states of the western Roman empire; and so their educated elites were no strangers to the ideal, and indeed the romance, of vast, multinational empires. They had been brought up on the histories of Rome and Alexander; and they were filling their imaginations with tales of chivalry, conquest and adventure in strange lands, of Amadís de Gaula (hero of a popular romance of the fifteenth century, published in Zaragoza in 1508), his son Esplandián (1510), and many, many others.^* History was about to make their dreams come true.

这个将在征服和殖民新世界的过程中扮演领导角色的国家，当时已经感受到自己正步入黄金时代。一个世纪以来充满变数的阴谋诡计，最终在西班牙两个相互竞争的王国——北部和中部的卡斯蒂利亚王国和东部的阿拉贡王国——的和平联合中得以解决。卡斯蒂利亚于1474年归于伊莎贝拉女王，阿拉贡则于1479年归于费尔南多国王。两位王子早已联姻，他们深受教皇的认可，并被授予“天主教君主”（Reyes Católicos）的称号。他们共同统治了二十五年，期间完成了对西班牙的基督教征服。最后一个摩尔人王国格拉纳达于1492年1月2日陷落，但长达十年的战争已使西班牙的国库捉襟见肘。

The country that would play the leading role in the conquest and colonisation of the New World already felt itself entering a golden age. A century of uncertain intrigue had been resolved in the peaceful union of Spain’s competing kingdoms, Castile in the north and centre, and Aragon in the east: Castile had come to Isabella in 1474, and Aragon to Fernando in 1479; princes already joined in marriage, they were so acceptable to the Pope that they went on to be granted the title of ’Reyes Católicos’. They were to reign together for another twenty-five years, during which they completed the Christian conquest of Spain. The last Moorish kingdom, Granada, fell on the second day of 1492, but the ten-year war had stretched the Spanish treasury to its limit.

从语言学角度来看，西班牙是由三种主要的罗曼语族语言组成的联盟：西部的加利西亚语（ gallego ）、中部的卡斯蒂利亚语（ castellano ）和东部的加泰罗尼亚语（ català ）。 ^†加泰罗尼亚语在语言上与法国南部使用的奥克语或普罗旺斯语更为相似。西班牙这三种语言的部分起源可以追溯到五世纪统治伊比利亚半岛的不同日耳曼语族群：西北部的苏维汇人，以及中部和南部的西哥特人。§^无论如何，卡斯蒂利亚在1230年吞并了西部王国（由莱昂统治），确立了其在该地区最强大的地位。与此同时，阿拉贡也逐渐占据了西部，并在1140年与加泰罗尼亚结成相对平等的联盟。

Linguistically, Spain was an alliance of three major Romance languages, Galician (gallego) in the west, Castilian (castellano) in the centre, and Catalan (català) in the east.^† Catalan is much more similar, as a language, to Occitan or Provençal, as spoken in southern France. It is possible to see part of the origins of the Spanish three in the different Germanic groups who took control of Iberia in the fifth century, the Suevi in the north-west, Visigoths in the centre and south.^§ At any rate, Castile established itself as the most powerful state in the region, having absorbed the western kingdom (ruled from León) in 1230. Aragon, in parallel, had come to dominate the west, uniting in a fairly equal partnership with Catalonia in 1140.

卡斯蒂利亚和阿拉贡的联合，以阿拉贡为辅，其语言影响在于，在十七世纪初文学蓬勃发展之前，卡斯蒂利亚语成为了整个西班牙的法定标准语。随着基督徒在安达卢西亚南部取代摩尔人，他们也用卡斯蒂利亚语重新殖民了西班牙南部。从此，尽管加利西亚语和加泰罗尼亚语保持了独立性，并拥有各自的文学传统，但卡斯蒂利亚语却成为了“西班牙语”的代名词，直至今日依然如此。

The linguistic effect of the union of Castile and Aragon, with Aragon as the junior partner, was to make Castilian the de jure standard for the whole of Spain, just before the flowering of literature in the early seventeenth century. And as Christians went on to replace Moors in the southern reaches of Andalusia, they recolonised the south of Spain with speakers of this Castilian. Henceforth, although Galician and Catalan retained their independence and still have their own literary traditions, Castilian became a synonym for ‘the Spanish language’, as it is to this day.

西班牙对基督教的态度强调高层权威，以此作为正统教义的保障，并在十五、十六世纪引领整个基督教世界大力推行这一理念。宗教裁判所成立于1480年，1492年，当局采取了将所有犹太人驱逐出境的极端措施。随后，在1502年，尽管十年前穆斯林在格拉纳达投降时曾明确保证伊斯兰教的信仰自由，但所有伊斯兰教的实践活动却被突然禁止。西班牙统治阶层普遍认为，真理只能在传承的传统中找到；同样，他们的政治理想是教皇与国王、教会与国家之间目标完全一致。

The Spanish approach to Christianity emphasised high-level authority as a guarantee of orthodoxy, and led all Christendom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in vigorously prosecuting this belief. The Inquisition had been founded in 1480, and in 1492 the extraordinary measure was taken of expelling all Jews from the kingdom. Then, in 1502, all practice of Islamic faith was abruptly banned, although it had been explicitly guaranteed in the terms of the Muslims’ surrender of Granada ten years before. There was a sense in the ruling circles of Spain that the truth was only to be found in inherited tradition; likewise the political ideal was for total unity of purpose between Pope and King, Church and State.

这给美洲的语言政策带来了一些奇特的后果。自由思想被视为有害的，而且具有传染性；其结果之一是，当西班牙接管美洲的教育时，当地学生更倾向于学习拉丁语而非卡斯蒂利亚语；本土文学永远无法保证完全不受各种误导的影响。然而，在向外语使用者传播西班牙文明的过程中，世俗和宗教在语言上的优先次序也逐渐显现出来：没有任何语言能像西班牙语那样象征帝国——但用当地语言传播理解，进而传播信仰，却更容易、更快捷、更可靠。

This was to have some strange effects on language policy in the Americas. Free thinking was seen as pernicious and indeed contagious; and a consequence of this was the preference, when Spain became responsible for education in the Americas, that native students should learn Latin, rather than Castilian; vernacular literature could never be guaranteed free of deceptive influences. But in spreading Spanish civilisation among foreign-language speakers, it would also become clear that the linguistic priorities of the secular and the sacred diverged: nothing matched the symbolic power of the Spanish language to signify empire—but it was easier, quicker and more reliable to spread understanding, and hence faith, in one of the native languages.

信仰和公正的政府是一回事，但获取财富则是另一回事。这方面存在着创新的空间。事实上，卡斯蒂利亚授权的这一新举措影响深远，甚至超越了十五世纪最天马行空的浪漫想象。在此期间，葡萄牙人正向南向东探索，寻找绕过非洲通往印度和香料群岛的航线；他们于1488年绕过好望角，并在随后的探险中抵达了传说中的东方：1499年抵达印度，1511年抵达马六甲（今马六甲），1514年抵达广州（今广州）。然而，就在1492年这个具有里程碑意义的年份，热那亚探险家克里斯托弗·哥伦布向西班牙人提供了一条更具冒险性的通往同一目的地的路线——向正西航行。伊莎贝拉女王支持他，结果却与预期大相径庭：这并非通往东方的经济后门，而是一系列全新的世界等待征服，最终获得了更为丰厚的回报。

Faith and righteous government might be one thing: but the getting of wealth was another. Here there was scope for innovation. Indeed, the new departure that Castile authorised was so far reaching in its consequences that it transcended even the wildest fifteenth-century romance. The Portuguese were exploring south and eastward in this period, finding a route round Africa to India and the spice islands; they had rounded the Cape in 1488, and were to reach the fabled orient on follow-up expeditions, India in 1499, Melaka (Malacca) in 1511, Guangzhou (Canton) in 1514. But in that same cardinal year of 1492, the Spanish were offered, by the Genoese adventurer Christopher Columbus, a more speculative path to the same destination, travelling due west. Queen Isabella backed him, and the result was quite different from what had been hoped: not an economic back door to the Orient, but a whole new set of worlds to conquer, ultimately a far richer prize.

一个前所未有的帝国

An unprecedented empire

卡利班对普洛斯彼罗说：

Caliban to Prospero:

你教我语言；而我的收获

是，我学会了诅咒：愿红色瘟疫降临你，

因为你教我你的语言！

You taught me language; and my profit on’t

Is, I know how to curse: the red plague rid you,

For learning me your language!

莎士比亚，《暴风雨》（1611），第一幕第二场第一行，1.321

Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611), i.2.1, 1.321

值得注意的是，在我们基督徒来到秘鲁之前，当地的印第安人有自己独特的发誓方式，与我们截然不同。他们没有像“以上帝之名”或“以天堂之名”这样充满肯定意味的誓言，只有诅咒或咒骂……例如，“如果我说的不是真话，愿太阳杀死我”。他们说的是mana checcanta õiptiy, indi guaõuchiuancmancha…有一次，我问某个省份的一位酋长是否是基督徒，他说：“我还不完全是，但我正在努力。”我问他对基督徒的信仰了解多少，他说：“我知道怎么向上帝发誓，会玩一点牌，而且我开始偷东西了。”

It is of note that the Indians of Peru, before we Christians had come to them, had certain and particular modes of swearing, distinct from ours. They had no assertive oaths, such as ‘by God’ or ‘by heaven’ but only execration or curses… e.g. ‘if I am not telling the truth, may the sun kill me’ they said mana checcanta õiptiy, indi guaõuchiuancmancha… Once when I asked a chieftain in a certain province if he was a Christian, he said ‘I am not yet quite one, but I am making a beginning.’ I asked him what he knew of being Christian, and he said: ‘I know how to swear to God, and play cards a bit, and I am beginning to steal.’

弗雷·多明戈·桑托·托马斯 (Fray Domingo Santo Tomás)，

Arte de la Lengua General … del Perú (1560)，第 1 章二十三

Fray Domingo Santo Tomás,

Arte de la Lengua General … del Perú (1560), ch. Xxiii

西班牙语传入美洲，是人类有记载的历史中，全新发展带来的首个语言影响。15世纪末，西班牙人和葡萄牙人发现，一种名为远洋帆船的新技术，凭借风帆驱动，并借助磁罗盘和对盛行风向的不断深入的了解，能够让他们直达世界遥远的角落。尽管这对这些航海强国来说是个意外，但对那些早已生活在这些帆船所抵达的地区的人们而言，冲击则更大。印度洋沿岸的阿拉伯人瞬间失去了对印度和中国贸易的垄断；印度人、中国人以及介于两者之间的所有民族都面临着来自贪婪的欧洲人的全新军事威胁。然而，对于美洲居民而言，由于他们自身没有航海传统，并且数千年来与世隔绝，远离长途航行的风险，这种冲击往往是致命的。

The spread of Spanish into the Americas was the first linguistic effect of a totally new development in recorded human history. The Spanish and the Portuguese discovered, in the late fifteenth century, that a new technology, the ocean-going ship, powered by sail, and guided by the magnetic compass and an evolving knowledge of prevailing winds, could give them direct access to distant parts of the world. Although this came as a surprise to these navigating nations, the shock was much greater to the peoples already living in the parts of the world on to which they burst. The Arabs of the Indian Ocean instantly lost their monopoly of trade with India and China; the Indians, the Chinese and all between them faced a new military threat from rapacious Europeans. But for the inhabitants of the Americas, without a seafaring tradition of their own, and so isolated for millennia from the hazards of long-distance contact, it was a shock that was usually fatal.

西班牙人入侵新大陆的举动令人震惊，这种震惊体现在方方面面。西班牙人的不理解体现在他们对新臣民的称呼上，克里斯托弗·哥伦布将他们误称为“印第安人”（indios）。^*哥伦布的假设，以及许多后世编年史家的效仿，也体现了这种不理解：敌对的加勒比海岛民显然是食人族（因此，“食人族”一词几乎成了“吃人肉的人”的代名词）。^†这种说法从未得到证实，或许是欧洲旅行者关于世界尽头的传说遗留下来的；希罗多德曾说，在斯基泰人之外居住着食人族；斯特拉波也曾讲述过关于斯基泰人甚至爱尔兰人的类似故事。1^但欧洲水手们可能误解了——为了迎合当时更为传统的恐怖观念——他们最初发现的关于土著人进行活人献祭的证据，尽管在当时，这种做法仍然令人难以置信。

The surprise of the Spanish irruption into the New World was registered in many ways. Spanish incomprehension can be seen in the permanent misnomer of their new subjects, called ‘Indians’ (indios) by Christopher Columbus.^* It is also seen in Columbus’s assumption, followed by many later chroniclers, that hostile Caribbean islanders were clearly cannibals (a term that as a result became synonymous with ‘eaters of human flesh’).^† Never substantiated, this may have been a hangover from the traditions of European travellers’ tales about the ends of the earth; Herodotus said that beyond the Scythians lived the flesh-eating Androphagi; and Strabo had retailed the same story about the Scythians themselves, and even the Irish.¹ But the European mariners may have been misinterpreting—to fit with more conventional horror—the first evidence they were finding of the true, but for then still truly inconceivable, indigenous practices of human sacrifice.

就我们的目的而言，西班牙人的无知最直接体现在哥伦布选择携带的语言学家身上，他希望借此促进沟通：路易斯·德·托雷斯懂希伯来语、阿拉姆语（“迦勒底语”）和一些阿拉伯语；罗德里戈·德·赫雷斯或许曾到访过几内亚的葡萄牙殖民地。尽管哥伦布可能理性地认为抵达中国后会遇到阿拉伯商人，但他的选择却雄辩地反映了他对世界其他地区语言状况的无知——在当时，即使是受过教育的西班牙人，可能遇到的唯一外来者也只是摩尔人或犹太人。事实上，^西班牙人继续将美洲的宗教中心称为“清真寺”：例如，科尔特斯在1520年写给国王的一封信中，谈到墨西哥一座从未见过穆斯林的城市时说：“我向陛下保证，我在该城里数出了大约430座塔楼，全部都属于清真寺。^”

Most directly for our purposes, the Spanish incomprehension can be seen in the linguists that Columbus had chosen to bring in the hope of easing communication: Luis de Torres, who knew Hebrew, Aramaic (’Chaldaean’) and some Arabic, and Rodrigo de Jérez, who had perhaps visited some of the Portuguese colonies in Guinea. Although he may rationally have believed he could run into Arab traders when he reached China, his choice is eloquent of the sheer ignorance of what the rest of the world was like linguistically, when the only alien that even an educated Spaniard was likely to meet was a Moor or a Jew.^* And indeed Spaniards went on calling the spiritual centres of the Americans ‘mosques’: for example, in a letter to his king in 1520, Cortés wrote, of a city in Mexico that had never seen a Muslim: ‘And I assure your Majesty that I counted from a mosque some 430 towers in the said city, all of them belonging to mosques.’²

当然，对眼前展现的新视野的茫然无知并非西班牙人独有。他们自视为基督教在这些新领域的使者，于是求助于教皇——恰巧也是西班牙人的亚历山大六世——以确认他们对这些领土的所有权。这种情况与我们今天在信息技术和遗传学等未知领域争相申请专利的情形颇为相似。1493年，教皇在授予西班牙对哥伦布首次航行发现的领土的主权后，又将亚速尔群岛和佛得角群岛以西一百里格（约合160公里）以内、西经30°以西直至印度的所有领土的所有权授予西班牙。如果这一决定得以确立，西班牙将拥有整个美洲的主权。然而，在哥伦布首次航行一年后，这一切都无人知晓。当时葡萄牙是唯一的主要竞争对手，他们对教皇的特许令极为关注，尤其希望以此确保其经大西洋通往非洲及更远地区的航线畅通。他们成功与西班牙谈判，将南北分界线向西移动了270里格，实际上到达了西经45°，这一名义上的界限在1494年的《托尔德西拉斯条约》中得到确认。这条分界线在实践中从未被明确界定，也与现代边界不符——例如，巴西内陆一直延伸到西经74°，海岸线甚至远至西经50°——但它确实是一个方便的经验法则，使葡萄牙对巴西拥有优先权。早在1500年，西班牙和葡萄牙的船只就已抵达巴西东南海岸，但直到1637年，葡萄牙才开始涉足亚马逊地区。

The incomprehension of the extent of the new horizons now opening up was of course not confined to the Spaniards. Seeing themselves quite explicitly as emissaries of Christendom in these new realms, they turned to the Pope—Alexander VI, conveniently a Spaniard—to validate their title to the territories. It was a situation familiar to us from the modern rush for patents in the uncharted areas of information technology and genetics. In 1493 the Pope, after granting Spain sovereignty over Columbus’s discoveries on his first voyage, went on to award it title to all territories more than a hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, approximately longitude 30°W, explicitly all the way to India. If it had become established, this would have given Spain rights to all the Americas. But no one could know this, a year after Columbus’s first voyage. The Portuguese were at this stage the only major competitors and were duly concerned about the Pope’s dispensation, above all in order to guarantee their routes through the Atlantic to Africa and beyond. They succeeded in negotiating with the Spaniards to have the north-south demarcation line moved 270 leagues farther west, effectively to longitude 45°, and this notional limit was agreed in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. It was never clearly identified in practice, and corresponds to no modern boundary—Brazil, for example, extends inland all the way to longitude 74°W, and even on the coast as far as 50°—but it did serve as a convenient rule of thumb, giving Portugal a prior claim to Brazil, whose south-eastern coast was first visited by both Spanish and Portuguese ships in 1500, but inhibiting its interest in the Amazon until 1637.

在美洲，这种难以理解的冲击以更为残酷的方式体现在人口的毁灭性损失上。我们无法准确估算欧洲人到来之前美洲的人口数量，估计值在1300万到1.8亿之间。但到处都有证据表明，在欧洲人抵达后的最初几年里，人口出现了大幅下降。首先，西班牙人抱怨他们最早殖民的岛屿——古巴和伊斯帕尼奥拉岛——人口锐减，而数据也证实了这一点：1496年伊斯帕尼奥拉岛的人口普查显示人口为110万，但仅仅18年后， 1514年的人口普查记录显示人口仅为2.2万。墨西哥经历了一系列流行病，始于西班牙人到访其首都特诺奇蒂特兰，这场瘟疫夺去了大部分土著居民的生命，并向南蔓延至危地马拉。约瑟夫·德·阿科斯塔在16世纪80年代写道，整个加勒比海地区“沿海地区的居住环境……极其荒凉破败，以至于当地居民的30%中只有29%的人已经死亡；而且很可能其余的印第安人也会在不久的将来消亡。” ^³

On the American side, the shock of incomprehension was registered more brutally, by a devastating loss of population. It is impossible to estimate safely the numbers living in the Americas before European contact. Estimates vary between 13 million and 180 million. But everywhere there is evidence of a massive fall in the early years after the Europeans arrived. First of all, the Spaniards complained of depopulation in the first islands they colonised, Cuba and Hispaniola, and the figures bear them out: a census of Hispaniola in 1496 gave a figure of 1.1 million, but just eighteen years later the repartimiento of 1514 listed 22,000. Mexico witnessed a series of epidemics, beginning with the Spanish visit to their capital Tenochtitlán, which carried off most of the native population, and spread southward into Guatemala. Of the whole Caribbean, Joseph de Acosta was writing in the 1580s: ‘the habitation of which coasts is … so wasted and condemned that of thirty parts of the people that inhabit it there wants twenty-nine; and it is likely that the rest of the Indians will in short time decay’.³

16世纪中叶，埃尔南多·德·索托率领探险队穿越佛罗里达和北美东南部，在密西西比河沿岸靠近现代孟菲斯的地方发现了大量印第安人，他们聚集在一些小城里。1682年，当白人（这次是法国人）再次来到这片地区时，这里已经空无一人。

Hernando de Soto led an expedition through Florida and the North American south-east in the mid-sixteenth century, finding a thick population of Indians, clustered in small cities, on the Mississippi river near modern Memphis. In 1682, when the area was next visited by white men (this time French), it was deserted.

疾病的传播速度比西班牙征服的矛头还要快：天花于1525年传入秘鲁，弗朗西斯科·皮萨罗于1532年去世。天花已经夺去了印加王瓦伊纳·卡帕克及其众多亲属的生命，并引发了西班牙人日后利用的王朝斗争。此后，如同在世界各地一样，斑疹伤寒、流感、白喉、麻疹以及更多的天花等流行病肆虐秘鲁，给当地居民带来了巨大的痛苦。

The diseases travelled faster than the spearheads of Spanish conquest: smallpox arrived in Peru in 1525, Francisco Pizarro in 1532. It had already killed Huayna Capac, the Inca, and many of his relations, and precipitated the dynastic struggle that the Spaniards were to turn to their own advantage. Thereafter, as everywhere, further epidemics, of typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles as well as more smallpox, ravaged the population.

西班牙人并非以仁慈著称的征服者，但他们对种族灭绝并无兴趣。从踏上伊斯帕尼奥拉岛之初，他们就希望剥削当地土著的劳动力，而土著人口的突然锐减也令他们感到震惊。然而，在各地，土著人口的减少实际上都极大地促进了征服者语言的长期传播，通过削弱土著语言使用者群体，改变了人口比例。

The Spanish were not notably humane conquerors, but they had no interest in genocide. From the first days in Hispaniola, they had hoped to exploit the labour of the natives, and for this alone they were dismayed at the sudden and disastrous collapse in their numbers. Yet everywhere, the fact that the previous population was melting away would have materially aided the long-term spread of the conquerors’ language, changing the balance in numbers by subtracting predominantly from the speaker communities of the indigenous languages.

从世界的角度来看，凭借后见之明，西班牙向新大陆扩张的三个方面在历史上显得相当新颖。

From the perspective of the world, with full benefit of hindsight, three aspects of the Spanish advance into the New World stand out as quite new to history.

其一是，这是人类历史上不同种族之间的首次直接接触，这些种族来自截然不同的血统，彼此之间相隔数万年的独立发展。克里斯托弗·哥伦布和瓜卡纳加里（他在伊斯帕尼奥拉岛遇到的第一位国王）的共同祖先，至少生活在两千代之前，这段时间比基督诞生至今的时间长二十多倍。这位共同祖先生活在非洲，因此，这两个人的血统必须遍及全球才能相遇。从此以后，人类在世界范围内的迁徙不再受制于这种固有的线性发展模式：不同民族之间可以相互交流，跨越地域界限。

One is that this was the first direct confrontation of races of human beings from quite separate lineages, divided by tens of thousands of years of independent development. The last common ancestor of Christopher Columbus and Guacanagarí, the first king he encountered on Hispaniola, could not have lived less than two thousand generations before, a period over twenty times longer than the time elapsed since the birth of Christ. That common ancestor would have lived in Africa, and so the two men’s lineages had to extend all round the world before they could meet. From that moment onward, contacts would no longer be restricted by this intrinsic linearity in the human settlement of the world: nation would speak unto nation, from anywhere to anywhere.

正如我们所见，这一因素对席卷美洲人口的特殊灾难至关重要。事实证明，在美洲和西班牙达到顶峰的数千年发展赋予了欧洲血统一种如同秘密武器的特性：对多种疾病的抵抗力。由于这些疾病是地方性流行病，因此极易传播给任何其他与他们接触的人群。这种抵抗力，远比武器技术上的优势（使他们能够以少胜多）更为重要，它使得大片土著居民在有机会进行文化适应或长期反抗之前就被消灭殆尽。正是这一生物学因素，最能解释为什么如今美洲西班牙语国家的大多数人口都是混血儿。

This aspect was fundamental to the special catastrophe that, as we have seen, hit the American population. It turned out that the long millennia of development that had culminated in America and Spain had given the European lineage an attribute that acted like a secret weapon: resistance to a variety of diseases which, since they were endemic, were likely to spread to any other population with which they were in contact. This, far more than the technical superiority in arms which meant they could win battles against overwhelming numbers, eliminated swathes of the native population before they had any chance to adapt culturally, or rally in the long term. It is this biological factor, above all, which explains why the majority population in the Hispanic countries of America nowadays is everywhere mestizo.

西班牙扩张的第二个史无前例之处在于，这是人类历史上首次通过海上入侵征服一个外国大陆。海上帝国固然是古代和中世纪地中海地区的特征（雅典、迦太基和威尼斯便是其中的佼佼者），公元第一个千年，印度人也曾将其文明传播到孟加拉湾对岸，尽管当时并无明显的军事意图。就在西班牙建立帝国的八十年前，中国的郑和率领舰队横渡印度洋，向斯里兰卡征收贡赋，并向世人证明，如果中国愿意，它完全有能力抵达非洲东海岸。然而，此前没有任何帝国是通过控制远洋航道而建立或维系的。如今，一个被统治的领土首次可以远隔一个大陆，而维系这种联系的却是海军跨越海洋的力量投射。

The second unprecedented aspect of the Spanish advance is that this was the first conquest of a foreign continent by seaborne invasion. Maritime empires had certainly been a feature of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean (Athens, Carthage and Venice stand out), and in the first millennium AD Indians had projected their civilisation across the Bay of Bengal, though without apparent military intent. Only eighty years before the Spanish founded their empire, China’s Admiral Zheng-He had cruised the Indian Ocean, exacting tribute from Sri Lanka, and demonstrating that China was capable of reaching the eastern coasts of Africa, if it so chose. But no previous empire had been gained or maintained through the control of oceanic seaways. Now for the first time a subject territory could be a continent away from its government, the link maintained through the projection of power by a navy across oceans.

第三，征服新大陆是历史上第一次由众多独立行动发起的大规模入侵，这些行动往往由自由组织发起，即便那些被称为“先遣队队长”（ adelantados，即先锋部队的统帅，此前这一头衔仅用于面对穆斯林的边境省份的总督）的人都声称自己是代表西班牙国王行事。入侵部队的规模通常很小（科尔特斯在墨西哥只有607人，皮萨罗在秘鲁只有160人），以至于守军指挥官对威胁的性质判断失误，试图与这些不速之客谈判，或者至少观察他们，从而在防御中造成了致命的延误。新大陆的征服是由一系列由冒险家发起的战役拼凑而成的：哥伦布征服加勒比海（1490年代），科尔特斯征服墨西哥，阿尔瓦拉多征服危地马拉，加西亚征服玻利维亚，皮萨罗征服秘鲁（1520年代），克萨达征服新格拉纳达（即后来的哥伦比亚），门多萨征服阿根廷（1530年代），德索托征服佛罗里达，科罗纳多征服德克萨斯，卡布里略征服加利福尼亚，瓦尔迪维亚征服智利（1540年代），以上仅列举其中最著名或最成功的几位。每场战役的主要目的都是为了使参与者致富，尽管其正式理由是为了争取对国王的更大忠诚，并通过发展信徒皈依真教会来拯救灵魂。

Third, the conquest of the New World was the first major invasion to be undertaken in a number of independent initiatives, often by free enterprise, even if the adelantados—’advance men’, as the pioneer captains-general were known, their title previously reserved for the governors of frontier provinces facing the Muslims—all claimed to be acting on behalf of the king of Spain. The invasion forces tended to be so small (607 with Cortés in Mexico, 160 with Pizarro in Peru) that the defending leaders were misled as to the nature of the threat, and delayed fatally in their defences by attempting to negotiate with, or at least to observe, their unwanted Spanish visitors. The New World was conquered through a patchwork of campaigns of soldier adventurers: Columbus in the Caribbean (1490s), Cortés in Mexico, Alvarado in Guatemala, García in Bolivia, Pizarro in Peru (1520s), Quesada in New Granada (the future Colombia), Mendoza in Argentina (1530s), de Soto in Florida, Coronado in Texas, Cabrillo in California, Valdivia in Chile (1540s), to mention only the most famous or successful. Each campaign was aimed primarily at enriching its participants, even while the formal justification was to demand wider loyalty to the king, and to save souls by gaining converts to the True Church.

这一事件的这三个方面开启了一个全新的时代，并将成为未来主要语言接触的普遍特征。欧洲的海上强国向世界各地所有拥有海岸线的温带和热带地区派遣舰队，试图将它们据为己有，并将当地人民纳入其统治之下，使其成为他们的顾客、臣民和皈依者。这一系列征服标志着当今全球化世界发展的关键转折点，在这个时代，地球上几乎任何地方之间的距离都在24小时航程之内^。

These three aspects of the event usher in a radically new age, and were to become commonplace features of the major language contacts to come, as maritime nations of Europe sent fleets to every temperate and tropical part of the world that possessed a coastline, and attempted to claim them as colonies, and their people as customers, subjects and converts. This sequence of conquests marked the crucial transition in the development of the fully global world of today, where practically anywhere on the planet is within twenty-four hours’ travel of anywhere else.^*

几乎是事后才想到的，征服美洲最终确实实现了哥伦布最初的目的——建立与亚洲的联系。1565年，在西班牙国王腓力二世的指示下，一支来自墨西哥的探险队横渡太平洋，抵达宿务岛和吕宋岛，并在后来的菲律宾地区建立了西班牙统治的雏形。西班牙在太平洋的其他较小殖民地还包括马里亚纳群岛和关岛。西班牙的统治以及在当地传播西班牙语的努力一直持续到1898年美国赢得美西战争后才被美国接管。

Almost as an afterthought, the conquest of the Americas did eventually serve the purpose with which Columbus had set out, a link with Asia. In 1565, on the instructions of King Philip II, an expedition from Mexico crossed the Pacific to the islands of Cebu and Luzon, and established the beginnings of Spanish dominion in what was to be the Philippines. Other smaller Spanish colonies in the Pacific included the Marianas and Guam. Spanish control, and the attempt to spread the Spanish language here, was to last until the USA took over in 1898, after winning the Spanish-American War.

由于这些太平洋殖民地与美洲殖民地几乎同时获得，但它们仍属于旧世界的香料群岛，处于印度和中国势力范围的边缘，因此它们与美洲殖民地形成鲜明对比，有助于凸显西班牙在新世界发展的特殊性。西班牙在菲律宾从未取得广泛或深入的进展，尽管存在了三个多世纪，但在二十世纪初很快就被英国取代。值得思考的是，这种差异的根源在于西班牙在美洲的发展，尽管美国在经济上占据主导地位，但西班牙语仍在以牺牲英语为代价而发展壮大。

Since these Pacific colonies were gained at much the same time as the Americas, but were very much part of the Old World of the spice islands, on the edge of India’s and China’s zones of influence, they provide a useful contrast to highlight the special features of the progress of Spanish in the New World. Spanish never made widespread or deep-seated progress in the Philippines, and despite over three centuries of presence was soon displaced by English in the early twentieth century. It will be interesting to ponder the roots of the difference with Spanish in the Americas, where despite US economic dominance Spanish is still growing at the expense of English.

首先可以指出，菲律宾的征服并不具备美洲征服的所有史无前例的特征。诚然，这是一场海上入侵，其出发点如同许多北美探险一样，位于墨西哥。但菲律宾的目标土地属于旧大陆而非新大陆，因此并未遭受席卷美洲的欧洲疾病带来的灾难性免疫力缺失：西班牙人的到来并未导致太平洋地区原住民人口的锐减。此外，菲律宾的殖民并非由各个群体出于自身利益而分散探索和开发，而是由西班牙政府建立，最初设在宿务，随后在马尼拉建立更为永久的据点。此后，西班牙势力的扩张，以及西班牙语的传播，主要依靠传教士（或多或少）出于无私目的的活动。菲律宾缺乏美洲发现的贵金属，而且从西班牙前往菲律宾要困难得多，因为唯一勉强可行的路线是穿过墨西哥：这个殖民地几乎没有给讲西班牙语的社区提供发展壮大的实际动力。

One can state at the outset that the conquest of the Philippines did not share in all the unprecedented properties of the conquest of the Americas. It was, admittedly, a seaborne invasion, and its point of origin was, like many expeditions of exploration into North America, in Mexico. But the land targeted was part of the Old World, not the New, and hence did not suffer from the disastrous lack of immunity to European diseases which devastated America: the advent of the Spanish was not followed in the Pacific by any collapse in the native population. Furthermore, the settlement of the Philippines did not proceed by individual groups spreading out to explore and exploit in their own interest. It was a Spanish government foundation, set up first at Cebu, and then, more permanently, in Manila. Thereafter, expansion of Spanish presence, and hence the Spanish language, came through the (more or less) disinterested activities of missionaries. The Philippines lacked the precious metals found in the Americas, and were much harder to reach from Spain, since the only barely practical route lay through Mexico: the colony offered little practical incentive for a Spanish-speaking community to grow and expand.

语言障碍的第一个突破口：

口译员、双语人士、语法学家

First chinks in the language barrier:

Interpreters, bilinguals, grammarians

德·奎萨达将军试图弄清楚究竟是谁在与他对抗。他们用两块盐饼俘虏了一个印第安人，正是他带他们来到了这片土地上。这个印第安人通过交谈已经能说几句西班牙语。将军让他去问几个被俘的当地印第安人，让他们做翻译。印第安人用他们的语言回答说：“ musca puenunga ”，意思是“很多人”。听到这话的西班牙人说：“他们说这些人像苍蝇一样多……”[奎萨达]用火绳枪向他们扫射。印第安人见西班牙人不靠近就杀了他们，立刻四散奔逃；我们的士兵追击他们，直到这支庞大的队伍溃散消失。据说在追击过程中，西班牙人说：“这些人比苍蝇还多；但他们像苍蝇一样飞走了。”于是，他们就被称作“Mosca”（苍蝇）。这次袭击结束了整场战争。

General de Quesada tried to find out what people were arrayed against him. There was an Indian whom they had captured with two cakes of salt and who had led them to where they were in this realm, and who through conversation already spoke a few words of Spanish. The General had him ask some Indians of the country whom he had captured to serve as interpreters. They replied in their language with the words musca puenunga, which is the phrase for ‘many people’. The Spaniards who heard it said: ‘they say they are like flies [moscas]’… [Quesada] gave them a blast from the arquebuses. Then when the Indians saw that without coming up to them the Spaniards were killing them, without waiting a moment they took flight; our men gave chase and attacked them, until the great host came apart and disappeared. In the pursuit they say that the Spanish said: ‘There were more of these than flies; but they have taken flight like flies’; with which the name [Mosca] was fixed for them; and this assault finished off the whole war.

胡安·罗德里格斯·弗雷勒，《征服和发现格拉纳达新王国》，

第六章（写于 1636 年，描述了 1536 年波哥大地区的事件）

Juan Rodriguez Freyle, Conquest and discovery of the New Kingdom of Granada,

ch. vi (written in 1636, describing events in the region of Bogotá in 1536)

或许是因为第一次航行中带来的语言支持不足（或者说是误入歧途），哥伦布感到失望，于是在他继续航行探索岛屿的过程中，绑架了船上的一些人，并将他们带回西班牙。“他觉得应该从古巴岛（或者他当时认为的西班牙大陆）带一些印第安人到卡斯蒂利亚，让他们学习卡斯蒂利亚语，了解当地的秘密，并向他们传授信仰。” ^⁴

Perhaps disappointed by the inadequate, because misguided, linguistic support he had brought on his first voyage, Columbus had kidnapped a handful of the people in his ships as he sailed onward around the islands he was exploring, and then taken them back to Spain. ‘It appeared to him that he should take to Castile, from this Isle of Cuba or the mainland as he was already reckoning it to be, some Indians so that they might learn the tongue of Castile and to know from them the secrets of the land, and in order to instruct them in the matters of the faith.’⁴

他们当中有几人被引荐到宫廷，并接受了洗礼，而且教父教母还是皇室成员。他们中的大多数人要么死在了西班牙，要么一回到印度就逃走了，只有一人（受洗后改名为迭戈·科隆）担任了翻译。哥伦布起初以为他遇到的所有“印第安人”都说同一种语言；但迭戈在巡视加勒比海其他岛屿时所发挥的作用有限，这让哥伦布——欧洲人中第一个——开始意识到这片土地上的语言是多么的丰富多样。

Several of them were presented at court, and received baptism, with royal godparents, no less. Most of them either died in Spain or took flight as soon as they returned to the Indies, and only one of them, now (after baptism) known as Diego Colón, did service as an interpreter. Columbus had at first been under the impression that all the ‘Indians’ he met spoke the same language; but the limited usefulness of Diego as he toured even the rest of the Caribbean islands gave him, first of the Europeans, an inkling of how diverse the language stock of these lands really was.

这种试图抓捕有潜力的年轻人并训练他们成为翻译的做法从未取得过显著成功，尽管这种做法持续了大约三十年。当候选人被强行带走时，会引发当地居民的强烈不满——泰诺印第安人在其文化中早已饱受邻国掠夺奴役和活人献祭的痛苦经历——而且，太多学徒在欧洲不自然的环境中丧命。

This kind of attempt to capture likely lads and train them up as interpreters was never a great success, although persisted with for thirty years or so. It caused resentment when candidates were taken by force—the native populations of Taino Indians already had bitter experience in their own culture of raids by neighbours for enslavement and human sacrifice—and far too often the apprentices died in the unnatural setting of life in Europe.

更有效的做法是自然而然地，让一位落魄的西班牙人，无论是遭遇海难还是逃离族人，在印第安村落中生活，从而学习他们的语言，然后再返回印第安村落担任翻译。有记载的此类案例不下十余例。⁵^其中一例对西班牙首次深入美洲内陆至关重要。1519年，科尔特斯深入墨西哥帝国腹地，通过两位翻译进行沟通。其中一位是赫罗尼莫·德·阿吉拉尔，一位在尤卡坦半岛海岸遭遇海难后，在玛雅村落生活了八年的西班牙人；另一位是著名的玛琳-辛，一位来自科阿察科阿尔科斯的纳瓦特尔语女性，她幼年时被交易到附近的玛雅部落希卡兰戈。

More effective was the natural process whereby an isolated Spaniard, shipwrecked or on the run from his own people, would take up life in an Indian village, and so get to know their language, before returning to act as interpreter. There are a good dozen such cases on record.⁵ One of these turned out to be crucial for the first Spanish advance into the interior of America, when in 1519 Cortés penetrated to the heart of the Mexican empire. He communicated through a relay of two interpreters, one of them Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Spaniard who had spent eight years in a Mayan village after a shipwreck on the coast of Yucatán, the other the famous Malin-tzin, a Nahuatl-speaking woman from Coatzacoalcos who had been traded to a nearby Mayan community, Xicalango, in childhood.

作为西班牙语口译员，许多母语为西班牙语的受训人员仍然能力不足，缺乏理解西班牙人真正利益的背景知识，即便他们像秘鲁人费利皮洛那样积极主动，费利皮洛“自学了西班牙语……[并且]是秘鲁的第一位口译员”。 ⁶

As interpreters of Spanish, many native trainees remained rather inadequate, lacking the background to understand the Spaniards’ real interests, even if they were as self-motivated as the Peruvian Felipillo, who had ‘learnt the [Spanish] language without anyone teaching him … [and] was the first interpreter that Peru had’.⁶

在征服秘鲁期间，他是主要的翻译，并在卡哈马卡战役决定性战役前夕，促成了与印加皇帝阿塔瓦尔帕的首次关键对话。费利皮略受命翻译多明我会修士维森特·巴尔韦德一篇措辞严厉却又精辟的演说，演说阐述了基督教的基本教义，强调了教皇和西班牙皇帝查理二世肩负着使世界皈依基督教的重任，以及阿塔瓦尔帕必须毫不犹豫地臣服于他们的必要性。

He was the main interpreter during the conquest of Peru, and mediated the first, crucial, conversation with Atahuallpa, the Inca emperor, just before the decisive battle of Cajamarca. Felipillo was called on to translate a harsh and pithy address by the Dominican friar, Fray Vicente Valverde, which ran through the basic doctrines of Christianity, the apparent duty of the Pope and the Spanish emperor Charles to convert the world, and the consequent need for Atahuallpa to submit to them without further ado.

阿塔瓦尔帕的回复由印加·加尔西拉索转述。加尔西拉索本人是一位混血儿，精通西班牙语和印加语克丘亚语，同时也是一位博学的西塞罗修辞学研究者，他在事件发生后过了一辈子才开始著述。据他所述，糟糕的翻译似乎彻底断送了双方理解，甚至连基本的礼貌都无法维持。据说阿塔瓦尔帕的回复很长，首先就批评了翻译的糟糕质量：

Atahuallpa’s reply is transmitted by Inca Garcilaso, himself a mestizo bilingual in Spanish and the Inca language Quechua, but also a highly educated student of Ciceronian rhetoric, writing more than a lifetime after the event. By his account, the poverty of the translation seems to have vitiated any chance that understanding, or at least courtesy, could be maintained. Atahuallpa is supposed to have replied at length, starting with a comment on the poor quality of the interpreting:

既然你拒绝了我向使者提出的其他所有要求，那么至少答应我一个请求，即通过一位技艺精湛、忠诚可靠的翻译与我沟通，将会令我非常满意。因为人的风度和社交生活，通过言语比通过习俗更容易理解。即便你拥有高尚的品德，若不以言语表达，我也难以通过观察和体验来领悟。如果这在所有民族和国家之间都适用，那么对于我们这样来自地域相距遥远的人来说就更加必要了；如果我们试图通过不懂双方语言的翻译和使者来沟通，那就好比是在用牲畜的嘴说话一样^。

It would have caused me great satisfaction, since you deny everything else I have requested of your messengers, that you should at least have granted me one request, that of addressing me through a skilled and faithful translator. For the urbanity and social life of men is more readily understood through speech than by customs, since even though you may be endowed with great virtues, if you do not manifest them by words, I shall not easily be able to perceive them by observation and experience. And if this is needful among all peoples and nations, it is much more so between those who come from such widely different regions as we; if we seek to deal and talk through interpreters and messengers who are ignorant of both languages it will be as though we were conversing through the mouths of beasts of burden.⁷

如此冗长的演讲显然会让费利皮洛这样一位水平一般的翻译感到不知所措，但这很可能是加尔西拉索的虚构故事，符合古典历史写作的优良传统。然而，加尔西拉索确实声称，西班牙人“无法忍受冗长的演讲，便离开了阵地，袭击了印第安人”。因此，对用陌生语言进行的冗长演讲的不耐烦，或许在后来发生的事件中起到了一定的作用。

A speech of this level of elaboration was evidently going to floor such a simple interpreter as Felipillo, but it is most likely a fiction of Garcilaso’s, in accord with the best traditions of classical history-writing. Nevertheless, Garcilaso does claim that the Spaniards ‘who were unable to brook the length of the discourse, had left their places and fallen on the Indians’. So intolerance of long-windedness in an unknown language perhaps played a role in the action that did develop.

征服完成后，西班牙人掌握了权力，但新建立的经济秩序——将当地居民分配到土地或矿山从事劳动——几乎没有任何因素能够促进西班牙语的广泛传播。人口流动性强，重复性的工作也使得统治者与被统治者之间的沟通需求降至最低。当时既没有像罗马帝国那样的兵役制度，也没有像中世纪欧洲那样修道院和大学的普及，这些都无法有效地将西班牙统治者的语言传播到他们的领地。无论如何，西班牙本土不断有西班牙语使用者移民，壮大了西班牙语人口。然而，要组织当地居民的工作，仍然需要相当数量的双语者。随着西班牙移民（绝大多数为男性）娶印第安女子为妻或情妇（mancebas），并开始与她们组建家庭，这些双语者自然而然地出现了。他们的孩子被称为混血儿（ mestizos），会从父母那里学习两种语言。早在1503年，法庭就建议伊斯帕尼奥拉岛总督让一些基督徒与一些印第安妇女结婚，以便他们能够彼此交流和学习^。8

After the conquests were achieved and Spaniards installed in positions of power, there was little in the new economic order that was established, with native inhabitants of a region assigned to work on the land or in mines, that would have encouraged widespread diffusion of the Spanish language. Repetitive duties among static populations would minimise the need for communication between master and subject. There was nothing analogous to military service in the Roman empire, or the spread of monasteries and universities in medieval Europe, which would diffuse the language of the Spanish masters around their domains. There was, in any case, a constant flow of Spanish speakers emigrating from Spain itself to boost the speaker population. Yet a substantial number of bilinguals would have been needed to organise the work of the natives. They would have arisen naturally as the Spanish immigrants, overwhelmingly male, took Indian wives or mistresses (mancebas) and began to raise families with them. Their children, known as mestizos, would learn both languages from their parents. ‘As early as 1503, the Court recommends to the governor of Hispaniola that some Christians should marry some Indian women, so that they may communicate with and teach one another.’⁸

这种对“新种族”（ Nueva Raza，即由跨种族通婚产生的“新人种”）的热情，是西班牙帝国主义与后来的盎格鲁-撒克逊帝国缔造者态度的一个显著区别。在那些著名的征服者中，几乎每个人都有混血儿，而且往往是与多位不同的女性所生，这些孩子都被完全承认为其父辈的继承人。科尔特斯、皮萨罗、贝纳尔卡萨尔和阿尔瓦拉多都符合这一传统；事实上，教皇克莱门特七世在1529年的一份教谕中正式承认了科尔特斯的三个儿子的合法身份，尽管他略作解释：“美德和美貌洗净了儿子们出身的污点，纯洁的习俗抹去了出身的耻辱。”

Such enthusiasm for the Nueva Raza, the ‘new race’ generated by these interracial unions, is one feature that strongly distinguishes Spanish imperialism from the attitudes of later Anglo-Saxon empire-builders. Among the famous conquistadores, almost every one had mestizo children, often with several different women, and they were fully recognised as heirs to their fathers. Cortés, Pizarro, Benalcázar and Alvarado all conform to this tradition; indeed, Pope Clement VII officially legitimised three sons of Cortés in a bull of 1529, although he did temporise a little: ‘the virtues’ beauty purges in the sons the stain of the birth, and with the purity of customs the shame of origin is effaced’.

跨种族婚姻十分普遍（但随着非洲黑奴的涌入，情况很快变得复杂），以至于人们制定了一套用于描述混血儿的术语分类体系，并绘制了著名的插图。9^现代西班牙语评论家往往理想化这种状况，例如，他们会提及欧洲西班牙人的混血背景。然而，当时人们试图对所有人进行分类，而且名义上纯正的西班牙家庭（克里奥尔人）的权力和地位一直保持到帝国末期——实际上只有来自西班牙的移民才能超越他们——这些事实表明，当时的社会并非像人们有时声称的那样完全摆脱了种族压迫。然而，无论当时人们对各种婚姻形式的接受程度如何（无论这些婚姻是否被正式确立），关于这些家庭语言使用的文献资料都非常匮乏。

So common was interracial matrimony (soon complicated by the import of black slaves from Africa) that a taxonomy of the terms for mixed-race children was devised, and famously illustrated.⁹ Modern Hispanic commentators tend to idealise this state of affairs, referring, for example, to the mixed racial background of the Spanish in Europe, but the facts that the attempt was made to keep everyone classified, and that the power and status of the nominally pure Spanish families (criollos) remained high until the end of the empire—exceeded indeed only by that of immigrants from Spain—suggest that the society was not so free of race-based oppression as is sometimes claimed. However, whatever the level of acceptance and encouragement of the various types of union that were solemnised (or not), there is very little documentary evidence of language usage in these families.

现有的证据来自许多早期混血儿在文学方面展现出的卓越才能这一无可辩驳的事实。他们不仅是翻译，也是文学翻译家和作家，精通西班牙语和拉丁语。^*费尔南多·德·阿尔瓦·伊斯特尔索奇特尔（Fernando de Alva Ixtilxóchitl）出身于科尔特斯的盟友特斯科科国王家族，被誉为“阿纳瓦克的李维”，著有《奇奇梅克史》（Historia Chichimeca）。他的儿子巴托洛梅将洛佩·德·维加的两部同时期的西班牙戏剧和卡尔德隆的一部戏剧改编成了纳瓦特尔语。他们并非孤例；征服新大陆各个帝国的史册很快就被那些在征服中诞生的人们用西班牙语写成了。 ¹⁰

What evidence there is comes from the unchallengeable fact of literary distinction in many early mestizos. They were not only interpreters, but also literary translators and authors, in Spanish and in Latin too.^* Fernando de Alva Ixtilxóchitl, from the line of the kings of Tezcoco, Cortés’ allies, was known as the ‘Livy of Anáhuac’, author of the Historia Chichimeca. And his son Bartolomé adapted into Nahuatl two contemporary Spanish plays by Lope de Vega, and another by Calderón. They were not alone; chronicles of the conquest of all parts of the empires of the New World were soon being written up, in Spanish, by the very people produced by that conquest.¹⁰

最杰出的混血文学家或许要数印加人加西拉索·德·拉·维加（1539-1616）了。他出生于印加帝国首都库斯科，当时距离征服秘鲁已有七年。他的父亲是西班牙贵族塞巴斯蒂安·加西拉索·德·拉·维加·伊·瓦尔加斯上尉，母亲帕拉·钦普·奥克略是最后两位印加王瓦伊纳·卡帕克和阿塔瓦尔帕的远房表妹。二十岁出头，他移居西班牙，并在那里生活直至去世。因此，他的生平并不能直接反映秘鲁当时各种语言的相对强弱。但他对不同语言的运用却十分精通：他幼年时学习了克丘亚语和西班牙语，青年时期又学习了拉丁语，之后又掌握了足够的意大利语，足以翻译一本名为《爱的对话录》的书。他后来又撰写了两部篇幅很长的历史著作，分别是讲述德索托远征佛罗里达的《印加的佛罗里达》以及一部分为两部分的历史著作《印加皇家评注》和《秘鲁通史》。在后一部著作中，他着重探讨了克丘亚语和西班牙语的相对作用，并经常引用另一位著名的混血文学家布拉斯·瓦莱拉神父（他曾用拉丁语撰写过一部秘鲁史）的观点。

The most distinguished of the literary mestizos was probably the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), born in Cuzco, the Inca capital, seven years after the conquest, his father being the Spanish nobleman Captain Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas, and his mother Palla Chimpu Ocllo, second cousin of the two last Incas, Huayna Capac and Atahuallpa. He emigrated to Spain in his early twenties, and lived there until his death, so his career says little directly about the relative strength of languages in Peru. But he was a man familiar with the sense of different languages: having learnt Quechua and Spanish as a child, and Latin in his youth, he had then learnt sufficient Italian to translate a book entitled Dialogues of Love. He went on to write two lengthy historical works of his own, The Florida of the Inca, about de Soto’s campaign through Florida, and a two-part history called Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. In this last work, he has a lot to say about the relative roles of the Quechua and Spanish languages, often quoting the views of another famous literary mestizo, Father Blas Valera (who had written a history of Peru in Latin).

加西拉索和布拉斯·瓦莱拉认为，西班牙势力进入秘鲁，随之而来的内战和社会动荡，破坏了印加人成功地在其帝国范围内建立的便利的语言统一性，而这种统一性本应在基督教信仰的传播中得到利用。

It was Garcilaso and Blas Valera’s view that the advent of Spanish power to Peru, with the civil wars and social disruption that it brought in its train, had disrupted the convenient linguistic unity that the Incas had succeeded in imposing over their empire, and which should have been exploited in the propagation of the Christian faith.

因此，许多省份在西班牙人进入卡哈马卡时，其他印第安人还懂得这种通用语言，如今却已完全遗忘了它。这是因为随着印加帝国的覆灭，世界末日来临，再也没有人记得这种对传播福音如此便利和必要的语言了。西班牙人之间爆发的战争导致人们普遍遗忘，之后，邪恶的撒旦又播下了其他种子，阻止这种有利的制度得以实施……有些人认为，应该强制所有印第安人学习西班牙语，这样神父们就不必浪费精力学习印第安语了。任何听到这种观点的人都会毫不怀疑，这并非出于愚蠢的想法，而是源于努力的失败…… ¹¹

Whence it has come about that many provinces, where when the Spaniards entered Cajamarca the rest of the Indians knew this common language, have now forgotten it altogether, because with the end of the world and Empire of the Incas, there was no-one to remember something so convenient and necessary for the preaching of the Holy Gospel, because of the widespread oblivion caused by the wars which arose among the Spaniards, and after that for other causes which the evil Satan has sown to prevent such an advantageous regime from being put into operation … There are some to whom it appears sensible to oblige all the Indians to learn the Spanish language, so that the priests should not waste their efforts on learning the Indian one. This opinion can leave no-one who hears it in any doubt that it arose from failure of endeavour rather than stupid thinking …¹¹

有人声称¹² ，加尔西拉索的根本观点是，印加人比他们的征服者更能理解内布里哈的基本观点。正如我们所见，内布里哈开创性的西班牙语语法著作正是以“语言始终是帝国的伴侣”这一论点为开端。加尔西拉索无疑持有这样一种观点（尽管这种观点在当今的语言学家中并不普遍），即共同的语言能够促进相互理解和良好的人际关系：“因为词语的相似性和一致性几乎总是能够调和人们之间的矛盾，使他们走向真正的团结和友谊。” ¹³

It has been claimed¹² that Garcilaso’s underlying point was that the Incas understood better than their conquerors the fundamental point of Nebrija, whose ground-breaking grammar of Spanish—as we have seen—had begun with the thesis ‘that always language was the companion of empire’. Garcilaso certainly held the view, still widely held today though not among knowledgeable linguists, that a shared language makes for common understanding and good mutual relations: ‘because the likeness and conformity of words almost always tend to reconcile people and bring them to true union and friendship’.¹³

无论这一意识形态观点的真相如何，安东尼奥·内布里哈的著作，包括拉丁语语法（《拉丁语入门》）和当代西班牙语语法（《卡斯蒂利亚语语法》），都证明了语言的“艺术”能够被清晰地呈现在纸面上。随后涌向新大陆的传教士们正是利用这一论证，创立了世界上第一个描述语言学传统。

Whatever the truth on this point of ideology, the existence of Antonio Nebrija’s works, grammars both of Latin (Introductiones Latinae) and contemporary Spanish (Gramatica de la lengua castellana), demonstrated that it was possible to capture the ‘art’ of a language explicitly on the page. And the missionaries soon flocking to the New World made use of this demonstration to found the world’s first tradition of descriptive linguistics.

进入墨西哥——这片对教会而言全新的处女地，当时社会各阶层几乎没有双语者——方济各会、多明我会和奥斯定会的修士们立刻意识到，若想在传播信仰方面取得实质性进展，就必须用当地居民的语言进行工作。^*这意味着他们必须学习这些语言。需要接触的人口极其庞大：数百万人口，而1557年身处墨西哥的修士却只有802人。 ¹⁴显然，这是一项需要几代人才能完成的工作。而且，由于传教士必然会不断更迭，老传教士退休，新传教士从西班牙前来——也就是说，这项传统必须在没有子女自然传承的情况下延续——因此，每一代成年学习者都必须一遍又一遍地重新学习这些语言。世界历史上第一次出现了对语言学习教材的明确需求，特别是语法书（“ Artes ”）和词典，以及天主教传教士常用的祈祷书和忏悔录的母语版本。^†

Entering Mexico, this new virgin territory for the Church, where bilinguals hardly existed at any level of society, the Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars immediately realised that they would have to work through the people’s own languages if they were to make serious progress in spreading the faith.^* This meant the languages would have to be learnt. The population to be contacted was vast: many million to set against the 802 friars present in Mexico in 1557.¹⁴ Clearly, this was work for many generations. And since there would necessarily be a circulation of missionaries, with old ones retiring and fresh recruits coming out from Spain—i.e. the tradition had to be carried on without the natural transmission of languages through raising children—the languages would have to be taught afresh, over and over, to each new generation of adult learners. For the first time in the world’s history, there was a clear demand for language-learning textbooks, specifically grammars (’Artes’) and dictionaries, as well as native-language versions of the prayer books and confessionals that were the tools of the Catholic missionary’s trade.^†

恰逢其时，满足需求的技术手段也已具备：1535年，墨西哥城安装了印刷机；已知的第一部印刷品是1539年出版的《简明基督教教义》（Breve y más compendiosa doctrina Christiana），该书是为教会用途而作，尽管书名如此，却是用纳瓦特尔语写成的。1546年，弗雷·阿隆索·德·莫利纳（Fray Alonso de Molina）出版了《简明基督教教义墨西哥语译本》（Doctrina Christiana breve traduzida en lengua Mexicana）；1547年，安德烈斯·德·奥尔莫斯神父（Father Andres de Olmos）出版了《墨西哥语艺术》（ Arte de la lengua mexicana） ，并附有一本配套书籍《墨西哥语词汇表》（Vocabulario de la lengua mexicana）。^§随后出现了该国其他语言的卷本，首先是 1548 年用瓦斯特克语和 1550 年用米斯特克语阐述基督教教义。秘鲁迫不及待地等待出版，第一部盖丘亚语艺术《语法》，o arte de la lengua General de los Indios de los Reynos del Peru实际上于 1560 年在西班牙巴利亚多利德印刷。利马（秘鲁）于 1583 年出版，其首批产品包括《Catecismo en Lengua Espaõola y Quichua》、《Catecismo en Lengua Espaõola y Aymara》（均为 1583 年）和《Doctrina Christiana…traduzido en las dos lenguas Generales de este Reyno, Quichua y Aymara》（1584 年）。¹⁵

And conveniently enough, there were now the technical means to satisfy the demand: printing presses were installed in Mexico City in 1535; their first known product, the Breve y más compendiosa doctrina Christiana, which came out in 1539, was for ecclesiastical use, and despite its title was written in Nahuatl. In 1546 it was followed by Fray Alonso de Molina’s Doctrina Christiana breve traduzida en lengua Mexicana, and in 1547 by Arte de la lengua mexicana by Father Andres de Olmos, and an accompanying volume, Vocabulario de la lengua mexicana.^§ Volumes in others of the country’s languages followed, beginning with expositions of Christian doctrines in Huastec in 1548 and Mixtec in 1550. Peru could not wait for the press, and the first Arte of the Quechua language, Grammatica, o arte de la lengua general de los Indios de los Reynos del Peru, was actually printed in Spain, in Valladolid, in 1560. But when printing started in Lima (Peru) in 1583, among its first products were Catecismo en Lengua Espaõola y Quichua, Catecismo en Lengua Espaõola y Aymara (both 1583), and Doctrina Christiana… traduzido en las dos lenguas generales de este Reyno, Quichua y Aymara (1584).¹⁵

这仅仅是揭开了这片未知大陆语言的冰山一角。在美洲获得的语言知识最终规模庞大，主要用于服务传教活动。1892年，维奥萨伯爵列出了西班牙语言学家在三个半世纪的研究中于美洲发现的493种不同的语言，以及描述其中369种语言某些方面的重要文献标题。在此期间，共有667位不同的作者创作了1188部作品。 ¹⁶

This was just scratching the surface of the unknown continent’s languages. The ultimate harvest of linguistic knowledge that was gained in the Americas, primarily to serve missionary activity, was vast. In 1892 the Count of Viõaza listed 493 distinct languages identified by Spanish linguists in the Americas over three and a half centuries of research, and the titles of significant documents describing some aspect of 369 of them. In that period 667 separate authors had produced 1,188 works.¹⁶

回顾西班牙帝国扩张所揭示的美洲大陆如此庞大的多语言现象，我们几乎会因西班牙人所承担的重任而感到震惊。因为西班牙语作为来自如此众多不同文化背景的人们的第一或第二语言的传播绝非必然。

Looking back on this immense multilingualism of the Americas revealed by the penetration of the Spanish empire, we almost quail at the enormity of what the Spaniards took on. For the spread of Spanish as the first or second language of people from so many different traditions was by no means inevitable.

十六世纪，乃至十七、十八世纪，西班牙在其帝国的处境与十九、二十世纪的英国截然不同。尽管对于西班牙人而言，帝国是一个开放的机构，他们持续向殖民地移民，直至十九世纪初这些殖民地获得独立，但对于讲着大约493种外来语言的土著农村居民来说，情况却截然不同。他们中的大多数人通常居住在被称为“reducciones” （意为“避难所”）的集体定居点中，除了通过教会等级制度之外，几乎没有任何流动性，无论是人身自由、经济自由还是社会自由。他们或许会得到一些会说他们语言的神父的照顾，但除此之外，他们与西班牙统治者几乎完全隔绝。印第安人被许诺来世的救赎，却无法在今世获得任何进步。这种情况更像是中世纪的欧洲，而非宗教改革时期。因此，除了混血人种聚居区和城镇之外，不可能出现迅速或自动地向西班牙语转变的情况。

The situation of Spanish in its empire in the sixteenth century, and even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was very different from that of English in the nineteenth or twentieth. Although the empire was an open institution for the Spaniards, who continued to emigrate to the colonies until these achieved independence in the early nineteenth century, it was something else for the indigenous rural population, the speakers of those 493 or so alien languages. For most of them, often living in the collective settlements called reducciones, there was little mobility, physical, economic or social, except perhaps through the Church hierarchy. They might be looked after by priests who spoke their languages, but otherwise they were quite segregated from contact with the Spanish masters. The Indians were offered a ticket to salvation in the next world, but not to any sort of advancement in this one. It was a situation more like that of medieval Europe than that of the Reformation. Hence there could be no rapid, or automatic, shift towards Spanish, outside the mestizo communities and the towns.

人们甚至可以推测，如果当时有某种政治力量削弱或取代了西班牙对欧洲大陆的控制，西班牙语很可能会迅速消亡。毕竟，我们可以回顾一下公元第一个千年末期东南亚梵语的命运，以及帕提亚人和后来的穆斯林入侵时近东希腊语的境遇：这两种语言都与西班牙语的情况类似，都是顶级语言，最终却被少数精英所垄断。甚至还有一个对比实验可以佐证我们的观点，因为西班牙人在十九世纪末确实被驱逐出了他们在太平洋的殖民地。

One can even speculate that if some political force had undercut, or superseded, Spanish control of the continent in that period, Spanish would have faded away very fast. After all, we can recall what happened to Sanskrit in South-East Asia at the end of the first millennium, or to Greek in the Near East when the Parthians and then Muslims advanced: both these were in similar situations to Spanish, top-level languages that remained the preserve of a small elite. There is even a comparative experiment to prove our point, since the Spaniards were indeed expelled from their Pacific colonies at the end of the nineteenth century.

但在我们考虑西班牙语是如何巩固其在美国人口中的地位之前，我们需要了解一些美国语言的不同背景，这些语言在十六世纪和十七世纪仍然被广泛使用，并且几乎没有失去市场份额。

But before we consider how Spanish came to consolidate its hold on the American population, we need to consider the varied backgrounds of some of the American languages that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were still widely spoken and hardly losing ground.

过去的斗争：美洲语言的传播

Past struggles: How American languages had spread

正如我们所见，哥伦布早期航行中遇到的语言种类繁多、彼此之间缺乏沟通，令他感到沮丧。他最初沿着美洲大陆（即“陆地”）的海岸线航行时，失望地发现“他们彼此之间的沟通能力，就像我们和阿拉伯人之间的沟通能力一样差”。 ¹⁷当他航行至如今的洪都拉斯、尼加拉瓜和巴拿马沿岸时，他遇到的人们可能说着帕亚语、米斯基托语、瓜伊米语和库纳语。

Early on, as we have seen, Columbus was dispirited by the vast numbers of languages, with no mutual understanding among their speakers, which he encountered on his voyages. First running along the coast of the American mainland, Tierra Firme, he noted to his disappointment that ‘they no more understand one another than we do the Arabs’.¹⁷ The peoples he met as he cruised down the coasts of what are now Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama must have spoken Paya, Miskitu, Guaimí and Kuna.

当西班牙人以古巴圣地亚哥为据点，开始向更北的海岸线探索时，这种看似无边无际的混乱局面依然没有得到缓解。1517年，埃尔南德斯·德·科尔多瓦沿着尤卡坦半岛的北部和东部行进，在他两次登陆的地点，可能只遇到了（尤卡坦）玛雅语：这的确是一种语言，但与西班牙人之前遇到的任何语言都截然不同——而且没有任何迹象表明他们曾尝试识别或学习这种语言。^* 1518年，胡安·德·格里哈尔瓦进行了一次更长的沿海探险，在尤卡坦半岛停留了更多次，并在希卡兰科停留了一次。在那里，他遇到了另一种玛雅语，西班牙人称之为塔巴斯科的琼塔尔语（尽管现在它的使用者称之为约科坦语）。之后，他又在波顿昌停留，那里的语言是萨波特克语。随后，他在今天的韦拉克鲁斯地区又停留了两次，那里的语言是托托纳克语。在当时，手语仍然是最佳的沟通方式。

There was no relief from this apparently boundless babel when the Spaniards, from a base in Santiago de Cuba, began to explore the coastline farther north. Hernández de Córdoba, who in 1517 ran along the north and east of the Yucatán, could have encountered only (Yucatec) Maya in his two landfalls: a single language to be sure, but distinct from any the Spanish had previously encountered—and there is no sign that any attempt was made to identify or learn anything of the language.^* Then in 1518 Juan de Grijalva undertook a longer coastal exploration, with more stops in the Yucatán, and one at Xicallanco, where he would have encountered a different Maya language, called by the Spanish Chontal de Tabasco—though its own speakers now call it Yokot’an—and then further stops at Potonchan, where the language would have been Zapotec, followed by two more in the region of modern Vera Cruz, where the language was Totonac. Sign language remained the best means of communication for the time being.

如果西班牙人希望与印第安人建立广泛的交流，这并非一个令人鼓舞的开端；但这并非毫无代表性：当时美洲至少有两千种不同的语言，其中350种分布在墨西哥中部地区和西班牙人最先探索的地峡地带^。18

This was not an encouraging beginning, if the Spaniards were hoping to establish widespread communications with the Indians; but it was not unrepresentative: at least two thousand distinct languages were being spoken in the Americas at the time, 350 of them in the central regions of Mexico and the isthmus which the Spanish explored first.¹⁸

然而，当西班牙人先是成功接触，然后征服了美洲已存在的少数几个大型多民族国家后，他们发现内布里哈的格言——或者说预言理论——“语言永远是帝国的伴侣”在新大陆得到了充分的印证。美洲两大古代帝国，阿兹特克帝国和印加帝国，已将其语言传播至其疆域，覆盖了墨西哥中部的大部分地区以及安第斯山脉中南部直至太平洋沿岸。在政治和社会发展方面，奇布查人聚居地（位于今哥伦比亚中部）虽然不如阿兹特克帝国和印加帝国那样引人注目，但对于寻求黄金的西班牙人来说，这些聚居地仍然极具吸引力，因为它们都使用一种名为穆伊斯卡语的通用语言。当西班牙人抵达拉普拉塔河和格兰查科南部地区时，他们发现那里广袤的土地上，人们普遍使用图皮南巴语或瓜拉尼语，^*这两种语言密切相关，彼此可以互通。再往南，在寒冷多山的阿劳卡尼亚地区，好战的马普切人成功地抵抗了西班牙的征服，直到十九世纪中期。他们也拥有共同的语言，称为马普切语。

Nevertheless, when the Spaniards succeeded first in contacting, and then conquering, the few great multinational states that America had already produced, they found that Nebrija’s dictum, indeed predictive theory, ‘that always language was the companion of empire’ was amply borne out in the New World. The two great ancient empires of the Americas, the Aztecs and the Incas, had spread use of their languages throughout their realms, covering most of central Mexico and the central and southern Andes down to the Pacific Ocean. Less spectacular in terms of political and social development, but still highly gratifying to Spaniards in quest of gold, the Chibchan settlements in the northern Andes (at the centre of what is now Colombia) were characterised by a widespread common language, known as Muisca. And when Spain reached the southern region of the Río de la Plata and the Gran Chaco, it found a vast area where everyone spoke Tupinambá or Guaraní,^* two closely related and mutually intelligible languages. Farther south still, in the chilly and mountainous land of Araucania, the Mapuche, so warlike that they were successfully to resist Spanish takeover until the mid-nineteenth century, were also united by a common language, called Mapudungun.

这些广泛使用的语言实属罕见，其使用者仅占中美洲和南美洲不到10%的领土；然而，这片区域人口稠密，或许占到总人口的40%。这些广泛使用的语言对入侵者而言极为有利，因为一旦在新帝国中被标准化为辅助语言，便可省去建立有效沟通的漫长而艰辛的过程。令人惊奇的是，除图皮南巴语外，其余所有语言都恰好在西班牙人即将征服的美洲大陆地区使用。这一系列语言优势或许是西班牙在美洲的经济发展比葡萄牙、法国或英国至少早一个世纪的原因之一。如果没有某种通用语言，支撑墨西哥萨卡特卡斯州大规模金矿开采和安第斯山脉波托西州大规模银矿开采的庞大支持体系将无法运作，但当时的通用语言并非西班牙语。

These languages of wide extent were very much the exception, understood over less than 10 per cent of the territory of central and south America; but this territory was very highly populated, with perhaps as much as 40 per cent of the people. The widespread languages were to prove highly useful to an invading power, since when standardised as auxiliary languages in the new empire they could short-circuit the long and laborious process of establishing effective communications. By an amazing stroke of fortune, all but one (Tupinambá) turned out to be spoken in the parts of the continent that the Spanish were to make their own. This jumbo set of linguistic advantages may be one reason why the economic development of Spain’s empire in the Americas began at least a century sooner than those of Portugal, France or Britain. The vast support systems underlying the large-scale mining of gold in Zacatecas in Mexico, and of silver in Potosí in the Andes, would have been impossible without some common language, but the language was not in those days Spanish.

这些大规模使用的语言并非一直如此广泛分布。在探讨西班牙人如何使用这些语言之前，我们有必要先了解这些本土语言区域是如何形成的。

These large-scale languages had not always been so widespread. Before looking at the use the Spanish made of them, it is worth considering the processes by which these indigenous linguistic areas arose.

纳瓦特尔语的传播

The spread of Nahuatl

Zan iwki nonyaz in oompoliwi šocitl 啊？

Antle notleyo yez 在 kenmanian 中？

Antle nihtawka yez in tlaltikpak？

Ma nel šocitl，ma nel kwikatl！

Ken konšiwaz noyollo，yewaya？

在 tlaltikpak 中的 nen tonkizako。

Zan iwki nonyaz in oompoliwi šocitl ah?

Antle notleyo yez in kenmanian?

Antle nihtawka yez in tlaltikpak?

Ma nel šocitl, ma nel kwikatl!

Ken konšiwaz noyollo, yewaya?

On nen tonkizako in tlaltikpak.

我难道就只能像凋零的花朵一样消逝吗？

我的荣耀终有一天会化为乌有吗？

我的名声终有一天会湮没于世间吗？

至少还有花朵，至少还有歌声！

唉，我的心该何去何从？

我们走遍这世间，难道都是徒劳吗？

Shall I just go like the flowers which were fading?

Will my glory be nothing one day?

Will my fame be nothing in the earth?

At least flowers, at least songs!

Alas, what will my heart do?

In vain do we pass this way across the earth!

纳瓦特尔语歌词（Cantares Mexicanos，第 10 对开页右页，ll. 23ff.）

Nahuatl lyric (Cantares Mexicanos, folio 10 recto, ll. 23ff.)

首先，就其辉煌程度和人口规模而言，纳瓦特尔语的使用区域最为庞大。^*在西班牙统治时期，这种语言通常被称为“墨西哥语”（lengua mexicana），因为正如我们之前看到的（参见序言），阿兹特克人自称为“墨西哥人”（Mexica），称他们的土地为“墨西哥”（Mexico）。^*但这种语言并非阿兹特克人独有。具体来说，当科尔特斯于1519年抵达墨西哥谷时，纳瓦特尔语也被东部特拉斯卡拉地区的邻居使用，这些邻居并不在阿兹特克附庸国的势力范围之内。而事实证明，这些邻居准备与西班牙人结盟，共同对抗同样使用纳瓦特尔语的同胞。但这只是纳瓦特尔语在阿兹特克人出现之前传播的最后痕迹之一。事实上，有证据表明，纳瓦特尔语在墨西哥中部地区的出现至少可以追溯到公元7世纪，当时宏伟的特奥蒂瓦坎城毁于大火：据推测，当时皮皮尔人通过与当时占主导地位的托尔特克文明的某种交流而向南迁徙。托尔特克人几乎没有留下任何具体的痕迹，除了在后来统治墨西哥中部的阿兹特克人心中留下的神圣记忆。但如今，生活在遥远南方萨尔瓦多的皮皮尔后裔中，大约有二十人仍然在使用某种形式的纳瓦特尔语。由此可以推断，在公元第一个千年之交，纳瓦特尔语是墨西哥谷几乎所有居民的语言，他们环绕着当时一片广阔的湖泊：西北岸的阿茨卡波特萨尔科的特帕内克人，以及东部的特斯科科和库尔瓦坎城邦（显然是托尔特克人的继承者）。在更远的地方，例如太平洋沿岸的哈利斯科州西部和特万特佩克地峡东部，也有纳瓦特尔语的分布区域，这可能是以托尔特克人甚至特奥蒂瓦坎为中心的早期帝国的遗迹。

First in terms of magnificence, and also in population, was the realm where Nahuatl was spoken.^* This language was usually known in the Spanish period as lengua mexicana, since the Aztecs, as we have seen (see Prologue), referred to themselves as Mexica, and their land as Mexico.^* But this language had never been exclusive to the Aztec community. Specifically, when Cortés arrived in the valley of Mexico in 1519, Nahuatl was spoken by their neighbours in Tlaxcallan to the east also, outside the circle of the Aztecs’ vassal states, neighbours who, as it turned out, were ready to ally themselves with the Spanish against their fellow-speakers of Nahuatl. But this was just one of the last traces of a distribution of Nahuatl that pre-dated the Aztecs. In fact, there is evidence that the language’s presence in the general area of central Mexico goes back at least to the seventh century AD, when the monumental city of Teotihuacán was destroyed by fire: at that time the Pipil community are supposed to have moved south, through some interaction with the then dominant Toltec civilisation. The Toltecs left little concrete trace except a memory hallowed among the Aztecs who assumed control of central Mexico after them: but of the Pipil descendants who are left today, living far to the south in El Salvador, twenty or so still speak a form of Nahuatl. The straightforward assumption is that Nahuatl was the language of almost all the people living in the Valley of Mexico around the turn of the first millennium AD, encircling what was then a vast lake: the Tepanecs of Atzcapotzalco on the north-western shore, the states of Tezcoco and Culhuacán, apparently successors of the Toltecs, on the eastern. There were also areas of Nahuatl farther afield, westward in Jalisco on the Pacific coast, and eastward in the isthmus of Tehuantepec, perhaps remnants of an earlier empire, centred on the Toltecs or even Teotihuacán.

十九世纪末二十世纪初的比较研究表明，纳瓦特尔语几乎是乌托-阿兹特克语系或尤塔-纳瓦语系中最南端的成员，该语系分布范围广阔，北至现代俄勒冈州的肖肖尼人和派尤特人居住地。这种重建的语言地理分布与阿兹特克人的建国传说相吻合，传说中他们声称自己来自阿兹特兰（意为“苍鹭之地”），一个位于西北方向、具体位置不明的岛屿。因此，他们可能在1256年抵达墨西哥谷之前就已经学会了纳瓦特尔语，最初他们是流浪者、食腐动物，以蛇为食。^†然而，他们始终自称是奇奇梅克人的一支，奇奇梅克人是北方著名的狩猎采集游牧民族。如果这个故事属实，那么他们学习纳瓦特尔语的时间一定相当晚。奇奇梅克语（或称帕梅语）与奥托米语（也通行于墨西哥谷北部和西部）相关，但与纳瓦特尔语截然不同。阿兹特克人或许像法国的诺曼人一样，先定居下来学习一种新的语言，然后再通过征服将其传播开来。

Comparative studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have shown Nahuatl as almost the southernmost member of a family, known as Uto-Aztecan or Yuta-Nawan, which extends in a wide swath as far north as the Shoshone and Paiute peoples in modern Oregon. This reconstructed linguistic geography fits with the Aztecs’ foundation legend, by which they claimed to have come from Aztlan (’heron place’), an island somewhere unknown in the north-west. So they may have learnt their Nahuatl before they came to the Valley of Mexico in 1256, initially as vagrants and scavengers and eaters of snakes.^† Yet they always represented themselves as a branch of the Chichimeca people, renowned hunter-gatherer nomads of the north. If this story is true, they must have learnt their Nahuatl fairly late; for the Chichimeca or Pame language is related to Otomí, also spoken north and west of the Valley of Mexico, but quite unlike Nahuatl. The Aztecs may have been like the Normans in France, settling and learning a new language before projecting it through conquest.

他们先是在查普尔特佩克西部地区定居，后来被驱逐，然后加入库尔瓦坎（另一个自称是奇奇梅克人后裔的民族）当雇佣兵，接受了蒂萨潘熔岩床上一个非常低微的职位。

First squatting in the western region of Chapultepec, then chased out and enlisting as mercenaries with Culhuacán (another people who claimed descent from the Chichimeca), they accepted a very lowly billet on the lava beds of Tizaapan.

“好，”库尔瓦坎国王科克斯特利说。“他们是怪物，他们是邪恶的。”

’Good,’ Coxcoxtli [king of Culhuacan] said. ‘They are monstrous, they are evil.

或许他们会在那里遭遇不测，被蛇吞噬。

Perhaps they will meet their end there, devoured by snakes,

因为那里是许多蛇的住处。

for it is the dwelling-place of many snakes.’

但墨西哥人看到蛇时欣喜若狂。

But the Mexicans were overjoyed when they saw the snakes.

他们把它们煮熟、烤熟，然后吃了……

They cooked them, they roasted them and they ate them…

经过二十五年的斗争，他们终于忍无可忍，要求迎娶一位库尔瓦坎公主，大概是想让她做新娘，但随后却对她犯下了他们一贯的暴行。

After twenty-five years of this, they brought matters to a head, requesting a Culhuacán princess, presumably as a bride, but then committing a characteristic atrocity on her.

然后他们杀死了公主，并剥了她的皮。

Then they slew the princess and they flayed her,

他们剥了她的皮，然后用她的皮给一位祭司穿上了衣服。

and after they flayed her, they dressed a priest in her skin.

惠齐洛波奇特利（左边的蜂鸟，阿兹特克人的部落神）接着说：

Huitzilopochtli [Humming-bird on the Left, the Aztecs’ tribal god] then said:

“我的酋长们，去召见阿奇托梅特尔（公主的父亲）。”

’O my chiefs, go and summon Achitometl [the princess’s father].’

墨西哥人走了，他们去召见他。

The Mexicans went off, they went to summon him.

他们说：“哦，我们的主啊，哦，我的孙子啊，哦，主啊，哦，国王……”

They said, ‘O our lord, O my grandson, O lord, O king…

墨西哥人恳求你们说，你们的祖父们……

your grandfathers, the Mexicans beseech you, they say,

愿他前来瞻仰，愿他前来拜见女神。

’May he come to see, may he come to greet the goddess.

我们邀请他。……

We invite him.’…

当阿奇托梅特尔抵达蒂萨潘时，墨西哥人热情地欢迎他：

And when Achitometl arrived in Tizaapan, the Mexicans said in welcome:

“我的孙子啊，我的主啊，我的王啊，你已疲惫不堪。”

’You have wearied yourself, O my grandson, O lord, O king.

我们，你的祖父，我们，你的封臣，将使你生病。

We, your grandfathers, we, your vassals, shall cause you to become ill.

愿你得见，愿你向你的女神致敬。^*

May you see, may you greet your goddess.’^*

“很好，我的祖父们，”他说。

’Very good, O my grandfathers,’ he said.

他取了橡胶、乳香、鲜花、烟草和祭品。

He took the rubber, the copal, the flowers, the tobacco and the food offering,

他将它们献给了她，放在了他们剥皮的假女神面前。

and he offered them to her, he set them down before the false goddess whom they had flayed.

然后阿奇托梅特尔在女神面前扯下了鹌鹑的头颅：

Then Achitometl tore off the heads of the quail before his goddess:

他仍然没有看到在他面前斩首鹌鹑的那个人。

he still did not see the person before whom he was decapitating the quail.

然后他献上香，香炉燃起熊熊烈火，阿奇托梅特尔看到一个披着他女儿皮的男人。

Then he made the offering of incense and the incense-burner blazed up, and Achitometl saw a man in his daughter’s skin.

他惊恐万分。

He was horror-struck.

他大声呼喊，向他的领主和封臣们喊叫，

He cried out, he shouted to his lords and vassals,

他说：“他们是谁，哦，库尔瓦坎人？”

He said, ‘Who are they, eh, O Culhuacans?

你没看见吗？他们剥了我女儿的皮！

Have you not seen? They have flayed my daughter!

这些恶魔休想留在这里！

They shall not remain here, the fiends!

我们要杀光他们，我们要屠杀他们！

We shall slay them, we shall massacre them!

邪恶之徒必将在此被彻底消灭！

The evil ones shall be annihilated here!’

费尔南多·阿尔瓦拉多·特佐佐莫克。科罗尼卡·墨西卡约特尔，译。塞尔玛·沙利文

Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc. Crónica Mexicayotl, trans. Thelma D. Sullivan

阿兹特克人随后被驱赶到湖中，但他们用箭和盾牌制作了简易的木筏。当他们从湖对岸浮出水面时，受到了鼓舞。预言说，他们必须定居在“雄鹰鸣叫、展翅翱翔、雄鹰觅食、鱼儿飞翔、巨蛇被撕裂的地方”。在远处，一株仙人掌上，他们看到了这样的景象：一只雄鹰正在吞食一条蛇。一个声音喊道：“墨西哥人啊，就在这里！”但没有人能看见是谁在说话。他们知道，湖中央那些长满芦苇但易守难攻的岛屿，将会是他们的家园——特诺奇蒂特兰，意为“仙人掌之地”。那是公元1325年，即“第二宫”之年。

The Aztecs were then driven into the lake, but they made improvised rafts out of their arrows and shields, and when they emerged on the other side, they were inspired. It was prophesied that they must settle ‘where the eagle screeches, where he spreads his wings, where the eagle feeds, where the fish fly, where the serpent is torn apart’. In the distance, on a prickly-pear cactus, they saw this vision, of an eagle eating a snake. A voice cried out: ‘O Mexicans, it shall be here! ’ But no one could see who spoke. They knew that the reedy, but defensible, islands in the middle of the lake should be their home, Tenochtitlán, ‘place of the prickly-pear’. It was the year ome calli, ‘2 House’, 1325.

这就是那座广袤而神奇的湖城的起源。1519年11月，当入侵的西班牙人抵达此地时，它深深地吸引了他们。阿兹特克人在他们的湖区家园重整旗鼓、繁荣昌盛了一百年，随后开始通过一系列侵略战争扩张领土。首先，在伊兹科亚特尔（意为“黑曜石蛇”）统治时期（1427-1440年），他们控制了整个墨西哥谷；随后，在蒙特库索马一世·伊尔维卡米纳（意为“射天者”）统治时期，他们绕过了西部的邻邦韦特索辛戈和特拉斯卡拉的领土，抵达了加勒比海沿岸和南部的中部高原地区。又有两位统治时间很长的阿兹特克人统治着帝国，到十六世纪初，阿兹特克人征服了现代墨西哥中部约 10 万平方公里的领土，从加勒比海到太平洋，其中包括位于危地马拉太平洋沿岸的奇特飞地索科诺奇科。

This was the origin of the vast and miraculous lake city, which so entranced the invading Spaniards when they reached it in November 1519. The Aztecs had regrouped and prospered in their lakeland home for a hundred years, and then begun to expand their domains through a series of aggressive wars. First, under Itzcoatl (’Obsidian-Snake’), 1427-40, they achieved control of the Valley of Mexico as a whole, then under Motecuhzoma I Ilhuicamina (’Heaven-Shooter’) they outflanked the territory of their resistant neighbours to the west, Huetxotzingo and Tlaxcala, to reach the Caribbean coast and the central highlands to the south. Two more long-reigning tlatoani added to the empire, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century the Aztecs had conquered about 100,000 square kilometres of territory in the centre of modern Mexico, from the Caribbean to the Pacific, including the curious enclave of Xoconochco, down the coast on the Pacific border of Guatemala.

在长达五十年的血腥扩张中，只有一位大臣特拉卡埃莱尔 (Tlacaelel) 主宰着这一切。着眼未来，他的政策是焚毁所有被征服民族的书籍，以抹去前阿兹特克时代的记忆。尽管韦特索辛戈 (Huetxotzingo) 和特拉斯卡拉 (Tlaxcala) 在阿兹特克人的扩张中被绕过，但他仍然强迫他们接受一项奇特的协议：进行持续但形式上规范的战争，即“花之战”( šoci-yāōyōtl )，一种定期进行的战斗，目的是俘虏战俘用于祭祀。在纳瓦特尔语中，“花”( šocitl ) 一词具有积极、空灵的含义（例如，本节开头的诗句中就使用了“花之歌”( in šocitl in kwīkatl)，意为“花与歌”，即“诗歌”），但它始终与鲜花在祭祀中的作用，如同人血一样，密不可分。

A single minister, Tlacaelel, presided over the first five decades of this bloody expansion. With an eye to the future, his policy was to burn all the books of conquered peoples to erase memories of a pre-Aztec past. Even though Huetxotzingo and Tlaxcala had been bypassed in the Aztec advance, he imposed on them a curious agreement to conduct continual, but formally regulated, warfare, the šoci-yāōyōtl or ‘flower-war’, a regular engagement to do battle in order to capture prisoners for sacrifice. The word šocitl, ‘flower’, has a positive, ethereal value in Nahuatl imagery (for example, in šocitl in kwīkatl, ‘the flower the song’, meaning ‘poetry’, used in the verse that begins this section), but it is never free of association with the role of flowers in sacrificial offerings, just like human blood.

阿兹特克人的这次成功征服使纳瓦特尔语在墨西哥中部广泛传播，但这似乎并没有以牺牲附属民族的语言为代价。相反，阿兹特克人在所有主要城市都安插了官员，特别是贡赋监察官，并确保被征服的民族提供一支纳瓦特尔语翻译队伍，以确保统治者的意愿能够有效传达。在科尔特斯首次登陆时，来自被征服的托托纳克地区的官员中就有两位纳瓦特尔语使用者。而且，在此之前，纳瓦特尔语显然已经通过其他一些不为人知的迁徙传播开来：例如，科尔特斯的翻译马林-钦就是纳瓦特尔语的母语使用者，但她是在科阿察科阿尔科斯（位于加勒比海沿岸，距阿兹特克帝国边境以南50公里）习得这种语言的。

Familiarity with Nahuatl was spread all over central Mexico by this successful aggression of the Aztecs, but it does not seem to have happened at the expense of the languages of tributary peoples. Rather the Aztecs planted officials, especially tribute overseers, in all the major cities, and ensured that the subject peoples provided a corps of nauatlato, ‘interpreters’, to ensure effective transmission of the rulers’ wishes. Two Nahuatl speakers were among the officials from the subject Totonac territory who met Cortés when he first landed. And Nahuatl had clearly been spread by other, unknown, population movements prior to this: Cortés’s interpreter Malin-tzin, for instance, was a native speaker of the language, but she had acquired it in Coatzacoalcos, on the Caribbean coast 50 kilometres south of the border of the Aztec empire.

因此，在西班牙征服之前，纳瓦特尔语充其量只能被视为一个多民族、多语言帝国的有效通用语：这个帝国包含的地区，至今当地土著居民仍使用萨波特克语、米斯特克语、塔拉斯科语、奥托米语、瓦斯特克语和托托纳克语，这些语言彼此之间以及与纳瓦特尔语都毫无关联。但在十五世纪，被征服地区与特诺奇蒂特兰中心之间的联系必然十分密切，不仅体现在贡赋征收层面，也体现在波奇特卡（pochteca，意为“商人”）网络中。这些波奇特卡同时也是使节和间谍，他们在阿兹特克等级制度中地位显赫，甚至可以将自己的奴隶与伟大战士献给维齐洛波奇特利的战俘一同献祭。

Before the Spanish conquest, Nahuatl should thus be seen as at best an effective lingua franca of a multinational and multilingual empire: the empire included areas where the indigenous population to this day speak Zapotec, Mixtec, Tarascan, Otomí, Huastec and Totonac languages, none of them related to one another or to Nahuatl. But in the fifteenth century, contact between the subject lands and the centre in Tenochtitlán must have been intense, at the level of tribute-gathering, and also through the network of pochteca, ‘merchants’, who also functioned as ambassadors and spies, and were so highly placed in the Aztec hierarchy that they could offer their slaves for sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli along with the war captives offered by great warriors.

克丘亚语的传播

The spread of Quechua

K'akichanpi millmacháyuj、

nina ráuraj puka runa、

mana õuqaqa atinichu

watuyta chay simiykita。

Imatachus õiwankipas

manapuni yachanichu。^*

K’ akichanpi millmacháyuj,

nina ráuraj puka runa,

mana õuqaqa atinichu

watuyta chay simiykita.

Imatachus õiwankipas

manapuni yachanichu.^*

红皮肤的人像火一样燃烧

，下巴上长着厚厚的羊毛，

我完全无法

理解你那奇怪的语言。

Red man who blazes like fire

and on the chin raises thick wool,

it is quite impossible for me

to understand your weird language.

我不知道你在跟我说什么，

我根本不可能知道。

I do not know what you are saying to me,

I cannot know in any way.

（印加人在卡哈马卡战役前对皮萨罗讲话）

Atau Wallpaj p' uchakakuynninpa wankan

阿塔瓦尔帕终结的悲剧¹⁹

(An Inca addresses Pizarro, before the battle of Cajamarca)

Atau Wallpaj p’ uchakakuynninpa wankan

The Tragedy of the End of Atawallpa¹⁹

在另一个伟大的前哥伦布时期帝国——印加帝国（又称“四部分”）的崛起过程中，语言传播远比西班牙复杂得多。当西班牙人抵达秘鲁时，印加帝国及其语言已覆盖安第斯山脉以西的整个高原地区，北起基多，南至塔尔卡，一条绵延约4000公里的皇家大道将各处连接起来，并将如今的厄瓜多尔、秘鲁、玻利维亚和智利北部的安第斯山脉和太平洋沿岸地区统一在一个政府之下。印加语使用者称之为“ runa simi”，意为“人类的语言”，但在西班牙人到来时，并没有一个公认的术语来指代这种语言：16世纪末，印加·加尔西拉索（Inca Garcilaso）在其双语著作中始终称其为“ la lengua cortesana de Cuzco ”，意为“库斯科的宫廷语言”。 1560年，多明戈·德·圣托马斯（Domingo de Santo Tomás）出版的第一部语法著作将其命名为“秘鲁通用语言，基丘亚语”（la lengua general del Perú, llamada, Quichua），这一名称沿袭了至少二十年来的惯例，并一直沿用至今。 ²⁰ “qhišwa”一词实际上指的是“温带”或“山谷”，位于海岸和高地之间。当时的普遍观点认为，位于库斯科城（印加首都，库斯科意为“肚脐”）以南的阿普里马克省安达瓦伊拉斯周围的温带地区是该语言的核心地带。 ²¹

Language spread had been a far more complex process in the growth of the other great pre-Columbian empire, the Inca realm known as Tawantinsuyu, ‘Four Portions’. When the Spanish reached Peru, its empire—and its language—covered the whole altiplano to the west of the Andes, from Quito in the north to Talca in the south, linked by a royal road that stretched some 4,000 kilometres, and uniting under one government the Andean and Pacific strips of modern Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and northern Chile. The language is known by its speakers as runa simi, ‘human speech’, but there was no accepted term for it when the Spanish arrived: Inca Garcilaso, a well-connected bilingual writing at the end of the sixteenth century, refers to it always as la lengua cortesana de Cuzco, ‘the courtly language of Cuzco’. The first published grammar, by Domingo de Santo Tomás, in 1560, names it, however, la lengua general del Perú, llamada, Quichua, following a tradition that had been attested for at least twenty years,²⁰ and this has stuck. The term qhišwa actually refers to ‘temperate zone’ or ‘valley’, intermediate between the coast and the highlands. The general view at the time was that the temperate zone round Andahuaylas in Apurímac province, south of the city of Cuzco (Qusqu, ‘navel’—the Inca capital), had been the heartland of the language.²¹

事实上，这似乎是后来的一种合理化解释。22^克丘亚语起源于利马周边沿海地区，其神谕位于帕查卡马赫（意为“大地统治者”），那里是钦查人（Chincha）海上贸易社群的中心。钦查人主要将他们的语言作为贸易术语向北传播，特别是向北延伸至卡哈马卡周围的北部高地以及厄瓜多尔境内，这片区域后来被称为钦查苏尤（Chincha-suyu），即印加帝国的最北端。这一切都发生在公元第一个千年，远在印加帝国成为一股不可忽视的力量之前。事实上，将克丘亚语嫁接到日益壮大的印加帝国几乎是事后才考虑的，其过程与波斯皇帝大流士采用阿拉姆语的过程颇为相似（参见第三章“简述：语言的飞跃”，第47页）。

In fact, this seems to have been a later rationalisation.²² Quechua was by origin the language of a coastal region round Lima, with an oracle located at Pachakamaj (’earth-ruler’), the base of a seaborne trading community called the Chincha, who spread their language primarily as a trade jargon out towards the north, particularly up into the northern highlands round Cajamarca and into Ecuador, the area that was to be designated the Chincha-suyu, the most northerly portion of the Inca empire. This all happened in the first millennium AD, long before the Incas were a force to be reckoned with. The grafting of the language on to the growing Inca empire would in fact come almost as an afterthought, by a process rather similar to the adoption of Aramaic by the politic Persian emperor Darius (see Chapter 3, ‘The story in brief: Language leapfrog’, p. 47).

印加文明的故事始于遥远的南方，的的喀喀湖南岸。在那里，一群讲普基纳语（Puquina ）的人们建立了一个重要的中心，即如今的蒂亚瓦纳科（Tiahuanaco）。似乎在公元第一个千年，他们与北方讲雅基语（Jaqi，现代艾马拉语的祖先，至今仍在玻利维亚使用）的人们合作，在北部和西部发展出一个内陆贸易区。这种贸易使得艾马拉语及其姊妹语言卡瓦基语（Kawki）和雅卡鲁语（Jaqaru，至今在利马东南部仍有残存）的知识传播到秘鲁南部的大部分地区。考古记录中可以清晰地看到这种传播，一种独特的陶器风格，上面描绘着一张被光芒或蛇环绕的面孔，这可能是创造神维拉科查（Viracocha）的形象。事实上，我们仍然可以找到源自这一时期的地名，例如卡哈马卡（Cajamarca）本身（Jaqi q'aja marka，“山谷中的城镇”）。

The Inca story began far to the south, on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca, where a group speaking the Puquina [pukína] language had established a major centre now known as Tiahuanaco. It seems that in the first millennium, in concert with speakers of Jaqi [háki], another language to the north (the ancestor of modern Aymara, still spoken in Bolivia), they developed an inland trading zone to the north and west; this trade would have spread knowledge of the Aymara language, and its sisters Kawki and Jaqaru (which still survive vestigially south-east of Lima), over much of the area of southern Peru. It is visible in the archaeological record in a distinctive style of pottery, depicting a face surrounded by rays or serpents, which could be the creator god Viracocha. It is, in fact, still possible to find place names that stem from this period, for example Cajamarca itself (Jaqi q’aja marka, ‘town in the valley’).

蒂亚瓦纳科统治者显然发现他们的故土受到泥石流的威胁，于是迁徙到的的喀喀湖对岸或绕湖而行，在库斯科建立了新的统治中心：这标志着印加帝国的崛起，在他们的神话中，第一位国王曼科·卡帕克的事迹被永载史册。据说他从湖中出现，手持一根金权杖，指引着他们的定居之地。（只有在库斯科，这根权杖才能直接插入地面。）他与妻子玛玛·奥克略一同前来，他们共同（但各自负责）教导男女文明技艺。此时，印加人实际上接受了艾马拉语作为王国的官方语言，并将普基纳语保留为宫廷精英使用的语言。（当然，留在的的喀喀湖南部的“贫苦亲属”仍然继续使用普基纳语。）库斯科当时一定是一座双语城市。这种情况持续了大约九代（从印加帝国的曼科·卡帕克到帕查库特克），印加帝国的疆域向东、向南，最终向北扩张。

The Tiahuanaco rulers, apparently finding their old home threatened by mud slides, then moved across or round Lake Titicaca, to set up a new base of command in Cuzco: this began the ascent of the Inca, immortalised in their mythology as the career of their first king, Manco Capac, who emerged from the lake, bearing a golden sceptre that would show where they should settle. (Only at Cuzco could it be plunged straight into the ground.) He came with his wife Mama Ocllo, and together (but respectively) they taught men and women the arts of civilisation. At this point, the Incas accepted Aymara de facto as the language of their kingdom, preserving Puquina as an elite language for court use. (Of course, it continued to be used by their ‘poor relations’, left behind south of Lake Titicaca.) Cuzco must have been a bilingual city. This situation did not change for some nine generations (from the Incas Manco Capac to Pachacutec), as the realm of the Incas was expanded east, south and finally northward.

随后，在印加帕查库特克统治时期，严重的侵略战争爆发了。向北扩张使印加帝国与钦查人发生冲突，但最终的解决方案是和平且极其积极的。帕查库特克（当时已娶了自己的妹妹）将他英勇的儿子图帕克·尤潘基许配给一位钦查公主，结果印加和钦查的领土合并。这导致了官方语言的转变，从艾马拉语转变为克丘亚语，这大概反映了当时人们认为哪种语言在印加和钦查合并后的领土上更普及、更实用。库斯科一度成为一座三语城市。这距离1528年西班牙征服还不到一百年。尽管库斯科克丘亚语具有重要的政治意义，但它仍然被视为一种低等语言，受到北方译员的轻视。随着帝国突然而又极其好战的扩张，这种新语言也随之传播开来。在图帕克·尤潘基的统治下，帝国向北推进到基多，途中吞并了重要的奇穆王国，并向南推进到智利。

Then, in the time of Inca Pachacutec, serious aggression began. Expansion northward brought the Inca domains into conflict with the Chincha: but the solution found was peaceable and extremely positive. Pachacutec (already married to his own sister) offered his son, the formidable Tupac Yupanqui, in marriage to a Chincha princess, and the result was a merging of the Inca and Chincha domains. This led to a switch of imperial language, from Aymara to Quechua, presumably reflecting a judgement on which was more widespread and useful in the combined Inca and Chincha domains. For a time, Cuzco became a trilingual city. This would have been much less than a hundred years before the Spanish conquest in 1528. Cuzco Quechua, for all its political importance, was still seen as a substandard variety, which interpreters from the north liked to look down on. The new language was then projected with the sudden, and extremely warlike, advances of the empire which, under Tupac Yupanqui, took it northward to Quito, incorporating the significant Chimú state on the way, and southward into Chile.

布拉斯·瓦莱拉神父坚持认为，印加人在其领土内推行的语言文化同化政策是明确的。

Father Blas Valera insists on the explicit language acculturation policies pursued by the Incas within their domains.

最后还要谈谈秘鲁土著的通用语。虽然每个省份都有自己独特的语言，但有一种通用语被称为库斯科语。在印加国王时期，这种语言的使用范围从基多一直延伸到智利王国和图库曼王国。如今，酋长们和被西班牙人奴役并管理事务的印第安人仍然使用这种语言。自古以来，印加国王一旦征服某个王国或省份，就会命令其臣民学习库斯科语，并将其传授给他们的孩子。为了确保这项命令不会落空，他们会派遣库斯科土著印第安人来教授他们宫廷语言和习俗。在这些省份和村庄，他们会为这些土著印第安人提供房屋、土地和庄园，使他们融入当地社会，成为永久的教师，他们的后代也将继承这一传统。印加统治者无论在和平时期还是战争时期，都更倾向于任命那些精通通用语言的人担任国家要职。正是基于这样的条件，印加人得以和平稳定地统治整个帝国，各个国家的附庸国之间如同兄弟一般，因为他们都说同一种语言…… ²³

It remains to say something of the lengua general of the natives of Peru, which although it is true that each province has its own language different from the others, there is one universal one that they call Cuzco, which in the time of the Inca kings was used from Quito to the kingdom of Chile and the kingdom of Tucuman, and now the chieftains use it and the Indians who the Spaniards hold as servants and to administer business. The Inca kings, from antiquity, as soon as they subjected any kingdom or province, would … order their vassals to learn the courtly language of Cuzco and to teach it to their children. And to make sure that this command was not vain, they would give them Indians native to Cuzco to teach them the language and the customs of the court. To whom, in such provinces and villages, they would give houses, lands and estates so that, naturalizing themselves there, they should become perpetual teachers and their children after them. And the Inca governors preferred in the offices of the state, in peace as in war, those who best spoke the lengua general. On these terms, the Incas ruled and governed their whole empire in peace and quiet, and the vassals of various nations were like brothers, because all of them spoke one language…²³

印加·加西拉索补充道：

And Inca Garcilaso adds:

这些国王还将附庸领主的继承人送往宫廷接受教育，并在那里居住直至继承王位，以便他们接受良好的教育，熟悉印加人的习俗和生活，并受到善待。这样，日后，凭借以往的交流和熟悉，他们就能爱戴并效忠于国王。国王称他们为“mítmac”，因为他们是新来者……这项规定使得通用语的学习更加轻松愉快，也减少了学习的艰辛和痛苦……每当他们返回自己的领地，都会带回一些在宫廷中学到的语言，并自豪地在自己的人民面前使用它，因为他们认为这是神圣的语言，这引起了其他人的羡慕，他们渴望学习并努力掌握它……就这样，在不到1300里格的领地内，他们轻松愉快地学习并使用了库斯科的通用语，而无需教师的特别指导。 [4,000公里] 这些国王征服的范围^。24

Those kings also sent the heirs of the lords of the vassals to be educated at the court and reside there until they came into their inheritance, to have them well taught and to accustom themselves to the condition and customs of the Incas, treating them kindly, so that afterwards, on the strength of their past communion and familiarity they should love them and serve them with affection: they called them mítmac, because they were newcomers… This injunction made it easier for the lengua general to be learnt with more enjoyment and less effort and grief … Whenever they returned to their lands they took something they had learnt of the courtly language, and spoke it with such pride among their own people, as the language of people they felt to be divine, that they caused such envy that the rest would desire and strive to learn it … In this manner, with sweetness and ease, without the particular effort of schoolmasters, they learnt and spoke the lengua general of Cuzco in the domain of little less than 1,300 leagues’ [4,000 kilometres] extent which those kings had won.²⁴

除了这些看似温和的方法之外，印加人还采取了一种更为严厉的手段：将一些地区重新安置以克丘亚语为母语的移民家庭，这些家庭也被称为“mitmaj ”，意为“移植者”。他们的目的是稀释和驯服当地原住民。这些人大约有1万到1.2万人，安置方式颇为巧妙：²⁵ “他们被安置到与他们原籍地性情相近的其他村庄或省份；因为如果他们来自寒冷地区，就被带到寒冷地区，来自炎热地区，就被带到炎热地区……他们被授予田地和土地作为劳动报酬，并被安排建造房屋。” ²⁶

To these apparently benign methods, the Incas had added the harsher one of repopulating some areas with colonies of Quechua-speaking immigrant families, also known as mitmaj, ‘transplants’. These were sent with the aim of diluting and pacifying the original population. There were ten to twelve thousand of them, settled with some finesse:²⁵ ‘They were passed to other villages or provinces of the temper and manner of those from which they issued; because if they were from a cold country they were taken to a cold country, and from hot, to hot … They were given estates in the fields and lands for their labours and a place to make their houses.’²⁶

奇布查语、瓜拉尼语、马普敦贡语的分布

The spreads of Chibcha, Guaraní, Mapudungun

Ňamandu Ru Ete tenondegua

…

Oámyvyma，

oyvárapy mba' ekuaágui，

okuaararávyma

ayvu rapytará i

oikuaa ojeupe。

mboapy mba' ekuaágui、

okuaararávyma、

ayvu rapyta oguerojera、

ogueroyvára Ňande Ru。

Yvy oiko' eÿre、

pytŭ yma mbytére、

mba'e jekuaa' eÿre、

ayvu rapytarā i oguerojera、

ogueroyvára

Ňamandu Ru Ete tenondegua。

Ňamandu Ru Ete tenondegua

…

Oámyvyma,

oyvárapy mba’ ekuaágui,

okuaararávyma

ayvu rapytará i

oikuaa ojeupe.

mboapy mba’ ekuaágui,

okuaararávyma,

ayvu rapyta oguerojera,

ogueroyvára Ňande Ru.

Yvy oiko’ eÿre,

pytŭ yma mbytére,

mba’e jekuaa’ eÿre,

ayvu rapytarā i oguerojera,

ogueroyvára

Ňamandu Ru Ete tenondegua.

真父纳曼杜，第一位…… 他从自身神性的智慧中

挺身而出，凭借其创造的智慧，构思了人类语言的起源，并使其成为自身神性的一部分。在地球存在之前，在原始黑暗之中，在万物知识出现之前，他创造了人类语言的基础，真父纳曼杜使其成为自身神性的一部分。

True Father Ňamandú, the First One…

Standing up straight

from the wisdom in his own godhead

and in virtue of his creating wisdom

conceived the origin of human language

and made it form part of his own godhead.

Before the earth existed

amidst the primordial darkness

before there was knowledge of things

he created what was to be the foundation of human language

and True First Father Ňamandú

made it form part of his own godhead.

Ayvu Rapyta，“人类语言的基础”，

姆比亚-瓜拉尼创世神话²⁷

Ayvu Rapyta, ‘The Foundation of Human Language’,

Mbyá-Guaraní creation myth²⁷

我们逐渐与动物渐行渐远。最初，这种差异微乎其微。所有生物都拥有阿切人的身体，也就是人的身体，并表现得像人一样。它们的主要共同点是都拥有语言（ javu）。

Gradually we move away from the animals more and more. In the first times, the difference was tiny. All living beings had an Aché body, a person’s body, and behaved as such. The main likeness was the possession of javu, language.

Aché Pyvé，“Aché 的起源”，

Aché-Guaraní 创世神话²⁸

Aché Pyvé, ‘The Beginnings of the Aché’,

Aché-Guaraní creation myth²⁸

对于在西班牙人到来之前就已经广泛传播的其他语言的发展历程，我们知之甚少。

Far less is known about the careers of the other languages that had become widespread before the advent of the Spaniards.

1536年西班牙人抵达时，安第斯山脉北部昆迪纳马卡高原地区主要使用奇布查语（或穆伊斯卡语）；然而，当时该地区政治上并不统一，且至少有三个主要中心：北部的通哈（洪萨）、南部的波哥大（穆伊基塔）以及东北部重要的宗教中心索加莫索（苏加穆西），因此方言也存在一些差异。征服者贡萨洛·希门尼斯·德·克萨达（与科尔特斯一样，也是一位四处奔走的律师）从沿海地区带来了翻译，但考虑到沿海语言如今的状况（例如伊卡语、科吉语），他们不太可能用接近自己母语的方式进行交流：更有可能的是，他们通过山区和沿海地区之间的传统贸易联系，对奇布查语有所了解。尽管奇布查人内部早已存在清晰的社会等级制度，并且不同中心之间（以及与其非奇布查语邻居之间）也存在与正式战役相关的军事组织，但没有证据表明这种语言的传播受到任何政治、军事或经济因素的影响。更有可能的是，这种语言仅仅是由定居于此的部落所创造的。而且，他们的族群显然已经在那里生活了相当长的时间：在东北方向几百公里外的杜伊特人（现已灭绝）和图内博人（也称乌瓦人）中，已经发展出了与奇布查语密切相关的语言。图内博人至今仍生活在安第斯山脉东坡，并继续使用他们的语言。

The altiplano of Cundinamarca in the northern Andes was largely monolingual in the Chibcha (or Muysca) language when the Spanish arrived in 1536; the area was not politically unified at the time, however, and with at least three major centres at Tunja (Hunza) in the north, Bogotá (Muykyta) in the south, and Sogamoso (Sugamuši), a major religious centre in the northeast, there was also some difference in dialects. The conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (like Cortés, another lawyer at large) had brought interpreters with him from the coast, but, in view of the coastal languages as they are now (for example, Ika, Kogi), it is unlikely that they could have communicated in anything like their own language: more probably, they had some knowledge of Chibcha from traditional trade links between the mountains and the coast. Although there was already a clear social hierarchy among the Chibcha, and military organisation associated with formal campaigns among the different centres (as well as their non-Chibcha-speaking neighbours), there is no evidence that the language had been spread by any political, military or economic influence. More likely, the language had simply been established by the tribes who had settled there. And their ethnic group had clearly been there for some time: closely related languages had evolved a couple of hundred kilometres to the north-east, among the Duit (nowadays extinct), and the Tunebo (also known as Uwa), who still live, and speak their language, on the eastern slopes of the Andes.

关于图皮-瓜拉尼语的背景知之甚少，但这种语言在南美洲低地的使用范围非常广泛；其变体在亚马逊河以北的苏里南以及哥伦比亚与巴西和秘鲁接壤的西部地区均有发现。在巴西中部和东南部、玻利维亚东部（被称为奇里瓜诺语）以及巴拉圭（被称为瓜拉尼语），都曾使用过这种语言（称为图皮南巴语）。它的传播可能与中美洲式农业在整个大陆的发展有关，这种农业以种植玉米、豆类和南瓜为主，辅以土豆、木薯、花生和辣椒。 ²⁹

Even less is known about the background of Tupí-Guaraní, but the language was spoken far more widely across lowland South America; forms of it have been found as far north as Suriname, north of the Amazon, and to the west in pockets on the Brazilian and Peruvian borders of Colombia. It was spoken (as Tupinambá) all over the centre and south-east of Brazil, in eastern Bolivia (known as Chiriguano), and in Paraguay (as Guaraní). Its spread may have been linked to the progress of Mesoamerican-style farming across the continent, of maize, beans and squash, supplemented with potatoes, manioc, peanuts and chili peppers.²⁹

至于马普切人的历史，我们知之甚少，也难以推断。他们一直保持独立，直到十九世纪下半叶；因此，西班牙人与他们接触的时间太晚，他们的语言马普切语（Mapudungun）尚未成为通用语言。在他们广袤的领土上使用同一种语言，表明他们可能是一个单一的族群，占据了一片并不肥沃的地区，并且人口稀少地分布在各地。

And of the Mapuche past, even less is known or can be inferred. They maintained their independence until the second half of the nineteenth century; and so Spanish contact with them came too late for any use of their language, Mapudungun, as a lengua general. The use of a single language across their extensive territory suggests that they were a single group who had taken possession of a not particularly fertile region, and were thinly spread across it.

现在我们必须转向西班牙人为在语言上组织其殖民地而采取的政策。但在那之前，值得指出的是，一个拥有广泛传播语言的群体，其政治组织程度与西班牙人到来后（得益于罗马化文字系统的传播）文学的发展之间存在着明显的关联。纳瓦特尔语和克丘亚语中存在着大量文学作品，其年代可追溯到征服之后不久，这些作品通常由此前统治墨西哥和秘鲁的精英阶层的直系后裔所著。^*与之相反，艾马拉语、奇布查语和瓜拉尼语并没有发展出本土的书面文学，尽管它们都曾被传教士语言学家赋予了书写标准：据我们所知，这些语言的文学作品仍然^局限于西班牙人的创作，并且主要用于支持基督教化进程。

We must now turn to the policies pursued by the Spanish to organise their colonies linguistically. But before we do so, it is worth pointing out that there is a clear correlation between the degree of political organisation of a group with a widespread language, and the development of a literature after Spanish contact (which took advantage of the transmission of a Romanised writing system). There are substantial literatures in Nahuatl and Quechua which date from the period immediately after the conquest, often written by immediate descendants of the elite who had ruled Mexico and Peru before.^* Aymara, Chibcha and Guaraní, by contrast, did not develop an indigenous written literature, even though they had each been given a written standard by missionary linguists:³⁰ as far as we can see, literature in the languages remained confined to the productions of the Spaniards, and largely to support the process of Christianisation.

教会的解决方案：通用语

The Church’s solution: The lenguas generales

陛下下令这些印第安人学习卡斯蒂利亚语。这绝不可能，除非他们学得含糊不清、水平很差：我们见过葡萄牙人，卡斯蒂利亚语和葡萄牙语几乎一模一样，在卡斯蒂利亚生活了三十年，却仍然学不会。那么，这些人的语言和我们的语言如此不同，而且说话方式如此优雅，难道还要让他们学习吗？依我看，陛下应该下令所有印第安人学习墨西哥语，因为如今每个村庄都有许多印第安人懂得墨西哥语，而且学起来也很容易，还有许多人用墨西哥语忏悔。墨西哥语是一种极其优美的语言，堪称世界一流。人们已经编纂了墨西哥语语法和词典，圣经的许多部分也被翻译成墨西哥语；还有人收集了讲道集，一些修士更是精通墨西哥语。

Your Majesty has ordered that these Indians should learn the language of Castile. That can never be, unless it were something vaguely and badly learnt: we see a Portuguese, where the language of Castile and Portugal is almost all the same, spend thirty years in Castile, and never learn it. Then are these people to learn it, when their language is so foreign to ours, with exquisite manners of speaking? It seems to me that Your Majesty should order that all the Indians learn the Mexican language, for in every village today there are many Indians who know it and learn it easily, and a very great number who confess in that language. It is an extremely elegant language, as elegant as any in the world. A grammar and dictionary of it have been written, and many parts of the Holy Scriptures have been translated into it; and collections of sermons have been made, and some friars are very great linguists in it.

弗雷·罗德里戈·德拉克鲁斯 (Fray Rodrigo de la Cruz) 致墨西哥查理五世皇帝，5 月 4 日 [三月？] 1550 ³¹

的信

Fray Rodrigo de la Cruz to Emperor Charles V

Mexico, letter of 4 May [March?] 1550³¹

我们人手太少，无法教印第安人卡斯蒂利亚语。他们也不想说。最好推广墨西哥语，这种语言使用广泛，他们也喜欢，而且还有成文的教义、布道词、语法和词汇。

We are too few to teach the language of Castile to Indians. They do not want to speak it. It would be better to make universal the Mexican language, which is widely current, and they like it, and in it there are written doctrine and sermons and a grammar and a vocabulary.

弗雷·胡安·德·曼西利亚 (Fray Juan de Mansilla)，将军，致

危地马拉皇帝查理五世，1551 年 9 月 8 日的信³²

Fray Juan de Mansilla, Comisario General, to Emperor Charles V

Guatemala, letter of 8 September 1551³²

如果拥有敏锐的智力和科学知识的西班牙人都无法像他们声称的那样学会库斯科的通用语言，那么如何才能让未开化、未受过教育的印第安人学会卡斯蒂利亚语呢？

If the Spanish with very sharp intellects and knowledge of the sciences cannot, as they claim, learn the general language of Cuzco, how can it be achieved that the uncultivated and untaught Indians can learn Castilian?

布拉斯·瓦莱拉神父，秘鲁，十六世纪中期³³

Father Blas Valera Peru, mid-sixteenth century³³

在1493年由亚历山大六世颁布的教皇诏书《Inter Caetera》中，西班牙对其殖民地拥有了合法的所有权。此外，在费迪南国王和伊莎贝拉女王向哥伦布颁布的指示中，都明确规定了在新大陆建立西班牙帝国的首要目标：使当地土著居民皈依基督教。该诏书确立了西班牙对其殖民地的合法所有权。早在1504年，随哥伦布第二次航行的博伊尔神父就向他的君主们解释说，由于缺乏翻译，福音的传播受到了阻碍。

In the papal bull of 1493 issued by Alexander VI, Inter Caetera, which formed the legal title of Spain to its colonies, and in the instructions issued to Columbus by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the conversion of the natives was enjoined as the supreme objective in building the Spanish empire in the New World. Already in 1504, Father Boyl, who had been sent out with Columbus on his second voyage, was explaining to his royal masters that the spread of the gospel was being delayed by lack of interpreters.

尽管如此，加勒比地区的基督教化进程仍然迅速推进，这主要得益于西班牙语的传播。正如我们所见，当时加勒比地区语言五花八门，由于没有通用语，唯一的选择就是使用每一种语言。1516年，西斯内罗斯枢机主教要求教堂司事教导酋长和重要人物的子女读写，“并教他们说卡斯蒂利亚罗曼语，尽可能地与所有酋长和印第安人合作，让他们说卡斯蒂利亚语”。 ³⁴ 1513年，政府的印第安人贸易中心（Casa de Contratación de Indias）向伊斯帕尼奥拉岛运送了20本内布里哈的《卡斯蒂利亚语艺术》（Arte de la lengua castellana ）。这一过程有效地实现了传播西班牙语的阶段性目标。许多记载表明，当地酋长精通西班牙语，并且能够读写。³⁵但从稍长远来看，真正的目标——建立一个全新的基督教社群——却因印第安人在西班牙人残酷剥削和随后从非洲大量输入黑奴的双重压力下逐渐消亡而受挫。无论如何，在人口急剧减少且西班牙人与印第安人之间没有隔离的情况下，只有西班牙语得以幸存也就不足为奇了。

Nevertheless, speedy progress was made with the Christianisation of the Caribbean, largely through Spanish. As we have seen, there was a babel of different languages in use in the Caribbean, and with no lingua franca the only alternative would have been to use each and every one of them. Cardinal Cisneros in 1516 required sacristans to teach the children of chieftains and important people to read and write, ‘and to show them how to speak Castilian Romance, and to work with all the chiefs and Indians, as far as possible, to get them to speak Castilian’.³⁴ Twenty copies of Nebrija’s Arte de la lengua castellana were delivered to Hispaniola in 1513, sent from the governmental Casa de Contratación de Indias. The process was effective in its intermediate goal of spreading Spanish. There are many reports of native chiefs who were masters of the language, and literate in it.³⁵ But in the slightly longer term, the real aim, a new community of Christian souls, was frustrated by the disconcerting tendency of the Indians to die off, under the extreme stress of Spanish exploitation, followed up by wholesale import of black slaves from Africa. At any rate, in a situation of catastrophic collapse of population, and no segregation of Spaniards from Indians, it is unsurprising that only the Spanish language survived.

西班牙势力扩张至欧洲大陆，造成了截然不同的局面。部分原因是由于拉斯卡萨斯神父的奔走呼号，部分原因是人口锐减的现实，人们已经对肆意剥削给加勒比海岛民（其中大部分是无辜的居民）带来的苦难感到愧疚，并且（至少在教会和王室中）决心不再重蹈覆辙。各个宗教团体迅速在新殖民地展开活动，并立即着手用当地语言与居民沟通。

The spread of Spanish power to the continent created a very different situation. Partly by virtue of the campaigning fury of Father de Las Casas, partly from the sheer fact of depopulation, there was already a guilty sense of what rampant exploitation had done to the largely innocent islanders of the Caribbean, and (at least in the Church and the royal court) a determination that this should not recur. The religious orders spread out across the new colonies, and immediately endeavoured to reach the inhabitants in their own languages.

由于我们刚才回顾的印第安人之前的活动，他们发现许多地区的语言状况比加勒比地区要容易处理得多。一些语言已经广泛传播；即使并非所有人都能掌握，但每个人都听说过这些语言，而且通常觉得它们比完全陌生的西班牙语更容易学习。

Because of the prior activities of the Indians which we have just reviewed, they found that in many of the territories the linguistic situation was much more manageable than it had been in the Caribbean. Some languages were already widespread; and even if they were not known to the whole population, everyone knew of them, and usually found them easier to acquire than the wholly alien Spanish.

经过一代人的努力，1550 年 6 月 7 日，王室颁布了一项指令，要求尽快教授西班牙新公民西班牙语：

After a generation of work in the field, a direction was issued by the royal court on 7 June 1550, to the effect that the new citizens of Spain should as soon as possible be taught the Spanish language:

我们为这片土地的福祉所期盼的主要事之一，便是使这片土地上的原住民得救、受教并皈依我们神圣的天主教信仰，同时使他们接受我们的政策和良好习俗；因此，论及实现这一目标的途径，显而易见，其中最主要的途径之一，便是下令教导这些民族学习我们的卡斯蒂利亚语，因为掌握了这门语言，他们就能更容易地学习福音的内容，并获得其他一切适合他们生活方式的知识^。36

As one of the main things that we desire for the good of this land is the salvation and instruction and conversion to our Holy Catholic Faith of its natives, and that also they should adopt our policy and good customs; and so, treating of the means which could be upheld to this end, it is apparent that one of them and the most principal would be to give the order how these peoples may be taught our Castilian language, for with this knowledge, they could be more easily taught the matters of the Holy Gospel and gain all the rest which is suitable for their manner of life.³⁶

奉命采取行动的教会人士立即表示反对。本节开头的引文清楚地表明了他们的论点。他们说，传播信仰的手段早已存在，而且使用的是主要人口中心广泛使用的语言。试图用西班牙语替代似乎毫无意义。即使在没有合适有效的通用语言的地方，他们仍然认为当地语言最适合他们的目的。波哥大大主教于1577年2月12日致信国王：

There was immediate resistance from the churchmen called to act on it. The nature of their arguments is clear from the quotations that head this section. Means for the propagation of the faith were already to hand, they said, and these used the languages widely spoken in the major centres of population. It seemed pointless to try to substitute Spanish. And even where there was not an appropriate and effective lengua general, they still felt that native languages were the best for their purposes. The Archbishop of Bogotá wrote to the king on 12 February 1577:

为了牵着他们的手，用好的方法聚集他们，我已经找到了最好的方法，没有任何其他方法能比得上用他们自己的语言宣讲和宣扬福音。我说“用他们自己的语言”，是因为在这个王国里，每个山谷或省份都有自己独特的语言；这不像秘鲁或新西班牙，那里虽然语言各异，但全国通用一种语言^。37

And to take them by the hand and gather them by good means I have arrived at the best way for it, and none that I have found will compare with preaching and declaring the Holy Gospel in their own languages. I say ‘in their own languages’, because in this Kingdom every valley or province has its own language different from the others; it is not like Peru or New Spain, where although there are different languages, they have a lengua general in use throughout the land.³⁷

有人认为，教会并非完全无意于推广当地土著语言的使用。通过通用语或其他不太常用的语言维持联系，意味着神父们仍然是纯血统印第安人（16世纪初占墨西哥人口的99%，1810年仍占55%）与外界之间唯一有效的沟通渠道。除了将他们视为某种权力基础之外，神父们还能保护他们免受当时在欧洲流传的宗教改革有害教义的影响，并在一定程度上保护印第安人免受西班牙殖民当局的掠夺。但没有证据表明教会故意限制西班牙语的使用：^相反，他们将西班牙语与拉丁语一起纳入所有学校的课程。只是由于印第安人大多居住在偏远的定居点或隔离的社区（reducciones）中，很少能与不会说双语的西班牙人交流，因此西班牙语在印第安人中未能流行起来。

There are those who say that the Church was not wholly disinterested in its promotion of the use of indigenous languages here. Maintenance of contact through the lengua general or other less accessible languages meant that the priests remained the sole effective channel between the pure-blood Indians (99 per cent of the population of Mexico at the turn of the sixteenth century, and still 55 per cent in 1810)³⁸ and the rest of the world. Besides holding them as some sort of power base, they could shelter them from the pernicious doctrines of the Reformation which were circulating in Europe, and to some extent protect the Indians from rapacious Spanish colonial interests. But there is no evidence that the Church deliberately restricted access to Spanish: rather, they made it part of the curriculum, along with Latin, in all their schools. It simply failed to catch on among Indians, largely isolated as they were in remote settlements, or in segregated communities (reducciones), with few non-bilingual Spaniards to talk to.

总之，西班牙王室的反应较为温和。卡洛斯五世统治时期，并未立即强制执行《皇家法令》。美洲的一些神职人员认为，应该努力在“某个适当的期限内”强制推行西班牙语，因为当时没有清晰、标准的术语可以用来布道。 ³⁹ 1586年，费利佩二世命令秘鲁总督调查此事，并采取他认为最合适的措施；但在1596年，他否决了一份《皇家法令》草案，该草案规定强制新西班牙的印第安人学习西班牙语，并禁止任何印第安酋长用他们的语言与他的族人交谈。他还附上了一条私人批注：“就此事以及此地所有相关事宜，请与我商议。” 7 月 3 日，《教区法令》最终签署，其中包含的指示是“为那些自愿学习卡斯蒂利亚语的人安排教师”，但要确保“教区牧师应该非常了解他们所教导的印度人的语言”。

In any case, the reaction of the Spanish Crown was emollient. No immediate enforcement of the Real Cédula was attempted under Carlos V. Some of the clergy in America were convinced that efforts should be made to make Spanish compulsory ‘within some adequate term’, because there was no clear, standard terminology in which to preach.³⁹ In 1586 Felipe II commanded the viceroy of Peru to look into the matter, and take whatever measures seemed best; but in 1596 he rejected a draft Cédula which would have provided for the compulsory teaching of Spanish to Indians in New Spain, along with prohibition of any of their chiefs talking to his people in their own language, adding the personal note: ‘Consult me on this and the whole issue here.’ When on 3 July the Cédula was finally signed, it contained instead the instruction to ‘put in place schoolmasters for those who would voluntarily wish to learn the Castilian language’, but to ensure that ‘the curates should know very well the language of the Indians whom they have to instruct’.

在接下来的两个世纪里，这种局面基本维持不变：城市里以西班牙语为主，混血社会中也越来越多地使用西班牙语；但在其他地方，则使用通用语，如果通用语没有通用语，则使用其他土著语言。从长远来看，最终结果似乎取决于印第安人聚居地的分布情况：例如，在新格拉纳达，由于印第安人聚居地很少，尽管奇布查语被公认为官方通用语，但其使用逐渐消失，最终被西班牙语取代。然而，即使在这些地方，印第安语言仍然在偏远地区得以保留。与此同时，在墨西哥、秘鲁和巴拉圭，通用语在口语和书面语方面都蓬勃发展，而一些小社区仍然继续使用他们自己的语言。

The result, maintained for the next two centuries, was very much the continuation of the status quo: Spanish in the cities, and increasingly in mestizo society; but elsewhere the lenguas generales were in use, and failing that other indigenous languages. The outcome in the long term seems to have depended on the prevalence of separate Indian settlements: for example, in New Granada, where these were few, the use of Chibcha gradually died out despite its recognition as an official lengua general, and Spanish replaced it. Nevertheless, even here Indian languages survived in remote areas. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Peru and Paraguay the lenguas generales flourished, in speech and in writing, even as small communities went on speaking their own languages.

接下来发生的是一个过程，即西班牙世界观的内容通过当时已广泛使用的语言进行传播。西班牙人无需费力地广泛教授自己的语言，也无需等待几代人的时间让母语传播开来；相反，他们获取并利用了这些古老的语言，无论这些语言是由之前的统治者传播的——尤其是墨西哥人、印加人以及（在一定程度上）奇布查人——还是仅仅是先前存在的贸易和交流语言——例如秘鲁南部和玻利维亚的艾马拉语，以及巴拉圭的瓜拉尼语。

What now occurred was a process whereby the content of the Spanish world-view was conveyed through the pre-existing languages of wider currency. The Spanish were spared the trouble of teaching their own language widely, or waiting a few generations for knowledge of it to spread; instead, they acquired, and turned to their advantage, the old languages, whether these had been spread by previous ruling powers—notably the Mexica, the Inca and (to a limited extent) the Chibcha—or were simply pre-existing languages of trade and intercourse—notably Aymara in southern Peru and Bolivia, and Guaraní in Paraguay.

在西班牙统治的头两个世纪里，最繁荣的语言无疑是纳瓦特尔语。由于西班牙在墨西哥建立了一个与西班牙人统治区分开来的“印第安人共和国”，并拥有独立的法庭，纳瓦特尔语的行政使用十分普遍。此外，西班牙神职人员不仅大力翻译和出版礼拜材料（如我们所见，辅以语言分析以辅助西班牙语学习者的培训），而且很快也出现了重现和讲述墨西哥前西班牙时期历史的文学作品。这主要包括历史著作和抒情诗。除了传统的文学体裁外，还出现了新的体裁，例如纳瓦特尔语百科全书编纂者弗雷·贝尔纳多·德·萨阿贡所作的这首赞美诗：“我用嘴唇塑造的珍贵玉石，我所散落的，我所吟诵的，都是一首合适的歌。”这一切不仅是赐予你的礼物，我亲爱的儿子，你是圣教会的儿子；如果你能将基督教信仰融入生活，那么你更应得更多……’，⁴⁰还有宗教剧，它延续了墨西哥的戏剧传统，服务于基督教信仰。莫托利尼亚是最初被派往墨西哥皈依基督教的十二位英勇传教士之一，^*他兴致勃勃地讲述了1538年和1539年上演的许多此类戏剧，包括《天使报喜》、《亚当和夏娃的堕落》以及《十字军攻占耶路撒冷》，这些剧目据推测都是由修士编剧和导演，但全部由印第安人演出。⁴¹七代之后，这一传统依然延续：1714年，特拉斯卡拉作家胡安·文图拉·萨帕塔创作了一部更具想象力的作品《圣十字架的发现》，其中有一幕是阿兹特克死神米克特兰特库特利与罗马皇帝君士坦丁对峙。42^时至今日，每年9月8日，特波斯特兰镇都会上演基督教皈依仪式：

The most flourishing of these in these first two centuries of Spanish rule was certainly Nahuatl. Since Spanish rule in Mexico created a ‘republic of the Indians’ separate from that of the Spaniards, and with separate courts, administrative use of the language was thriving. Moreover, there was not only a major effort by Spanish clergy to translate and publish liturgical material, supplemented as we have seen with linguistic analysis to aid in the training of Spanish learners; there was soon also a literature that recreated and retold the pre-Hispanic history of the country. This included above all the writing of history and of lyrical poetry. Besides the old genres, however, new ones were added: psalms, such as this one, composed by the Nahuatl encyclopedist, Fray Bernardo de Sahagún: ‘The precious jades that I also shape with my lips, that I also have scattered, that I have uttered, are a fitting song. Not only are all these a gift for you, beloved son, you who are a son of the holy Church; even more are your due … if you follow Christianity well as a way of life…’,⁴⁰ and the auto, or religious play, which continued the Mexican dramatic tradition in the service of the Christian faith. Motolinía, one of the heroic group of twelve missionaries first sent to convert Mexico,^* recounts with gusto a number of such plays performed in 1538 and 1539, including the Annunciation, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the Crusaders’ Capture of Jerusalem, presumably all scripted and directed by friars, but performed exclusively by Indians.⁴¹ Seven generations later the tradition was still alive: in 1714 the Tlaxcalan writer Juan Ventura Zapata wrote a somewhat more imaginative work, the Invention of the Holy Cross, which contains a scene where the Aztec god of the dead, Mictlantecuhtli, confronts the Roman emperor Constantine.⁴² To this day, in the town of Tepoztlán, a pageant of Christian conversion is presented every year on 8 September:

特拉卡帕扬：山民啊！特拉卡帕扬在寻找你。如今我已降临。我来此，要将你化为尘土，让你归于尘土。你听闻我的名声和话语，如今还惧怕什么？你竟将我们敬仰的神明抛弃于何处？你竟将自己交付于异邦人，那些邪恶的祭司。须知特拉卡帕扬的渴望。他从未失去洞察力。你必将毁灭，你必将灭亡。我的心无比坚定。

TLACAPAYAN: Mountain-dweller! Tlacapayan seeks you. Now I have come. I come to reduce you to earth and dust, and to earth and dust I will turn you. What do you now fear when you hear of my fame and my words? Where have you abandoned our revered gods? You have given yourself over to foreigners, those bad priests. Know what it is that Tlacapayan desires. He had never lost his vision. You will be destroyed and you will perish. And stout is my heart.

特波斯特科：为什么偏偏在这个时候，为什么偏偏是这个时候你来了？我正在享受、休息、欢庆，纪念永恒的童贞女、天主之母、我们珍贵的母亲……正如圣典《智者之书》中神圣的作者所说，我们珍贵的母亲，童贞女，的确是至高无上的。圣歌中说，十二颗星围绕着她的头，明亮的月亮支撑着她的双脚，如此遍及天地^。43

TEPOZTECO: HOW is it that right at this time, why is it that right now you have come, when I am enjoying myself, resting, rejoicing, commemorating the eternal Virgin, the Mother of God, and our precious Mother? … Truly exalted is our precious Mother the lady Virgin as says the divine author in the book of the wise. There it is said in the holy songs that twelve stars circle her head and that with the luminous moon her feet are supported, thus over all earth and heaven it spreads forth.⁴³

在秘鲁，人们对通用语言的态度更为复杂。克丘亚语与纳瓦特尔语一样，被广泛用于传播福音，同时也成为一种怀旧文学的载体，追溯着征服前的生活。但它也被并非印第安人后裔的克里奥尔地主阶级所接受，作为地方统治合法性的象征：它既将他们与利马讲西班牙语的城市精英区分开来，也剥夺了农村民众与地主保持距离的语言手段。然而，在征服后的两个半世纪里，克丘亚语日益成为秘鲁农民不满情绪的代表；这种不满在后半个世纪爆发为公开的起义，最终在1780年以自封的图帕克·阿马鲁二世（“王蛇”）为首的起义中达到高潮。据说，在叛乱被镇压之前，戏剧《奥扬泰》曾在领袖们面前上演。这部剧被誉为克丘亚戏剧的巅峰之作，讲述了印加公主与一位平民武士在伟大的印加统治者帕查库特克和图帕克·尤潘基（15世纪中期）鼎盛时期的一段凄美爱情故事。以下是剧中印加人略显突兀地展现其仁慈的片段。

In Peru, attitudes to the lengua general were more complex. Quechua, like Nahuatl, was widely used to preach the gospel, and at the same time became the vehicle for a nostalgic literature harking back to life before the conquest. But it was also taken up by the criollo landowning class, not themselves descendants of Indians, as a symbol of local legitimacy: at once it distinguished them from the Spanish-speaking urban elite in Lima, but also denied the country people a linguistic means to keep their landlords at a distance. Nevertheless, over the two and a half centuries after the conquest, Quechua came increasingly to represent the dissatisfaction of the Peruvian peasants; this exploded into open uprisings in the last half-century, culminating in the general rebellion in 1780 under the self-styled Tupac Amaru II (’Royal Serpent’). It is said that, before the rebellion was crushed, the drama Ollantay had been staged before the leaders. This is known as the finest work of the Quechua theatre, and tells the tormented love story of an Inca princess and a warrior commoner, in the heyday of the great Incas Pachacutec and Tupac Yupanqui (mid-fifteenth century). Here is the section where the Inca, somewhat abruptly, shows the quality of his mercy.

印加尤潘基：	选择你的惩罚。说吧，威拉克·乌穆。
威拉克·乌穆：	太阳赐予我一颗仁慈的心。
印加尤潘基：	鲁米，那么你必须开口说话。
鲁米·纳维：	印加啊，作恶的代价必须是残酷的死刑，这就是犯下滔天罪行之人的应得惩罚……
印加尤潘基：	你听说了吗？木桩已经准备好了！把这些叛军带到那里去！杀了这些恶人！
	…
	释放囚犯：	站到我面前来。你已死，逃脱了：山岳雄鹿，现在就逃吧。你已倒在我的脚下：今天，世人将知晓我心地善良。我必须百次地将你扶起，被放逐的敌人啊。你曾是安提苏尤的统治者：而今天，我见证，如果我愿意，你将达到任何你想要的高度：成为安提苏尤的统治者，永远做我的统帅…… ^*

艾马拉语在秘鲁南部和如今的玻利维亚（当时的查尔卡斯皇家法院所在地）仍然有人使用，其词汇与西班牙语经历了某种程度的融合：许多西班牙语借词大多用于表达新的基督教或西方思想，但也有些借词被用来表达传统概念：例如，Wirjina（源自西班牙语virgen）和Santa Tira（源自西班牙语Santa Tierra，意为“圣地”）都用来指代大地之母（在克丘亚语中称为Pachamama）。在许多其他情况下，艾马拉语词汇也具有了基督教的含义，例如jucha，意为“罪”。以下摘自一篇十八世纪的布道词，其中西班牙语借词以粗体标出：

Aymara, continuing to be spoken in the south of Peru and in what is now Bolivia (then the Audiencia of Charcas), underwent a kind of transfusion of vocabulary with Spanish: the many loans from Spanish were mostly for new Christian, or Western, ideas, but in some cases they were adapted to express traditional concepts: Wirjina (from Spanish virgen) and Santa Tira (from Spanish Santa Tierra, ‘holy land’) both came to stand for the Earth Mother (in Quechua Pachamama). In many other cases, Aymara words came to have Christian senses, as jucha, ‘sin’, in this short extract from an eighteenth-century sermon, where the Spanish borrowings are marked in bold:

卡姆斯塔，克里斯蒂亚诺？ Janiti 又名 isapasina kharkatita？ … P'arxtama、machaõa jucha jaytama、racionaljama、chuymanixama Diosana unaõchapajama jakaskama：janiki 动物 kankaõaru katuyasimti、janik sutiwisa kankaõaru katuyasimti：tukuxpana machaõa jucha、tukuxpana、munatanakay。

Kamsta, cristiano? Janiti aka isapasina kharkatita? … P’arxtama, machaõa jucha jaytama, racionaljama, chuymanixama Diosana unaõchapajama jakaskama : janiki animal kankaõaru katuyasimti, janik sutiwisa kankaõaru katuyasimti: tukuxpana machaõa jucha, tukuxpana, munatanakay.

基督徒啊，你说什么？听到这些话，你难道不战栗吗？……醒醒吧，弃绝醉酒的罪。作为理性的人，要明智，要活在上帝指引的道路上。不要让自己变成禽兽。不要再回到无名无姓的状态。亲爱的，要彻底断绝醉酒的罪，彻底断绝它^。44

What do you say, Christian? Do you not tremble to hear this? … Awake, put off the sin of drunkenness. As a rational being, be sensible, live in the path which God marks out. Do not make yourself an animal. Don’t return to being something nameless. Make an end of the sin of drunkenness, make an end of it, beloved.⁴⁴

瓜拉尼语是唯一最终被永久确立为官方国家语言的美洲原住民语言。早期西班牙语渗透率低的部分原因可能是瓜拉尼语地区在美洲地处偏远，导致当地缺乏讲西班牙语的女性建立西班牙语家庭。但瓜拉尼语的顽强生命力主要归功于耶稣会在巴拉圭的传教工作。在1609年至1767年间，耶稣会传教团在巴拉圭建立的“减贫社区” （reducciones ）——一种对亚松森周边压迫性的“委托监护制” （encomiendas ^）*的神圣而仁慈的回应——主导了欧洲人和印第安人之间的关系。1628年至1640年间，奴隶贩子（令人闻风丧胆的“马梅卢科人”）的袭击中断了这项工作，此后又持续受到委托监护人的骚扰。在减贫社区中，所有教学都使用瓜拉尼语，因此瓜拉尼语在基督教文化中获得了非常坚实的基础。耶稣会士所创造的世界的乌托邦性质可以从一些新词的字面意思中看出：îbîrayararusú，“大棒的主人”，即警长；kuarepotí ，“矿井的粪便”，即钱（在减税制度^下毫无用处）。45

Guaraní is the only indigenous American language that ultimately achieved permanent recognition as an official national language. Partly, the low penetration of Spanish in the early years may be due to the extreme remoteness of the Guaraní-speaking areas in the Americas, and the resulting lack of Spanish-speaking women to found Spanish-speaking families there. But the language mostly owes its resilience to the exemplary settlement by Jesuit missions in Paraguay. Their reducciones, communities founded as a holy and philanthropic reaction to the oppressive system of encomiendas^* around Asunción, dominated relations between European and Indian in the period 1609-1767. The work was disrupted by raiding slavers (the dreaded ’mamelucos’) in 1628-40, and persistently by encomenderos. In the reducciones, all teaching was carried out in Guaraní, and the language thereby gained a very strong basis in Christianised culture. The utopian nature of the world so created by the Jesuits can be seen in the literal meaning of some of the new words that became current: îbîrayararusú, ‘master of the big stick’, i.e. chief constable; kuarepotí, ‘excrement of the mines’, i.e. money (something that had no use in the reducciones).,⁴⁵

INKA YUPANTKI:	Akllaychis k' iriykichista。 Willaq-Umu，qan rimariy。
WILLAQ UMU：	Nuqaman ancha khuyaqtan Inti sunqota qowarqan。
INKA YUPANTKI:	Rumi, qanõataq rimariy.
鲁米·纳维：	Hatun huchaman chaninqa K'iri waõuypunin kanqa：Chaymi runataqa hark' anqa Huchapakunanta，印加…
INKA YUPANTKI:	Ňachu uyarirqankichisõa Takarpu kamarisqata。 Chayman pusay kaykunata！ Awqataqa sipiychisõa！… Paskaychis chay watasqata：Hatarimuy kay õawk'iyman！ Qespinkin waõuyniykita：Kuman phaway，luychu k' ita。 Ňan urmamunki chakiyman：Kunanmi teqsi yachanqa Sunqoypa llanp'u kasqanta。 Huqariqaykin qanta、Pachak kuti awqa mink' a。 Qanmi karqanki wanin' ka Anti-suyu kamachikoq: Qanllataqmi kunan rikoq , Nuqaq munayniy kaqtinqa, Chaymi maykamapas rinqa: Anti-suyuta kamachiy, Wamink' ay kapuy wiõaypaq…

耶稣会推行语言政策的一个明确动机是保护印第安人免受欧洲恶习的侵害。但培养古典语言（特别是拉丁语）的优雅晦涩，是美洲博学的修士们普遍奉行的政策，这在很大程度上是因为他们旨在在那里建立本土神职人员队伍。一些修士被他们的学生在古典学方面的成就所深深吸引。弗雷·托里比奥·莫托利尼亚是最初十二位前往墨西哥的方济各会传教士之一，他保存着这样一个轶事：一支来自卡斯蒂利亚的精锐队伍最终溃败。

An explicit motive in the Jesuits’ language regime was to protect Indians from European vices. But cultivation of the decent obscurity of a classical language, specifically Latin, was a policy widely pursued by the learned friars in the Americas, not least because they were aiming to found a native priesthood there. Some of the friars became enchanted by the achievements of their pupils in classical learning. Fray Toribio Motolinía, one of the twelve original Franciscan missionaries to Mexico, preserves this anecdote of the collapse of a stout party from Castile:

一位刚从卡斯蒂利亚来的神父遇到了一件非常有趣的事。他不相信印第安人懂得基督教教义，也不相信他们会背诵主祷文和信经。当其他西班牙人告诉他印第安人确实懂得这些时，他仍然半信半疑。这时，两个学生从教室出来，神父以为他们是印第安人，便问其中一个学生是否会背诵主祷文。学生回答会，神父便让他背诵。然后，神父又让他背诵信经，学生背得非常正确。神父质疑印第安人背对的一个词，印第安人坚持说自己是对的，而神父却不认同。于是，学生只好用拉丁语问他：“ Reverende Pater, cujus casus est? ^†”。由于神父不懂语法，他顿时语塞，不知所措^。46

A very fine thing happened to a priest recently arrived from Castile, who could not believe that the Indians knew Christian doctrine, nor the Lord’s Prayer, nor the Creed; and when other Spaniards told him they did, he remained sceptical; just then two students had come out of class, and the priest thinking they were from the rest of the Indians, asked one of them if he knew the Lord’s Prayer and he said he did, and he made him say it, and then he made him say the Creed, and the student said it perfectly well; and the priest challenged one word which the Indian had got right, and since the Indian asserted that he was right, and the priest denied it, the student had to ask what was the correct way, and asked him in Latin: Reverende Pater, cujus casus est?^† Then since the priest did not know grammar, he was left quite at a loss, covered with confusion.⁴⁶

在某些地方，西班牙人将通用语传播到了前哥伦布时期帝国疆域之外。在西班牙人的统治下，尤其是在其纳瓦特尔语盟友（特别是特拉斯卡拉人）的帮助下，纳瓦特尔语传播到了危地马拉。特拉斯卡拉人非常乐意将阿兹特克人驱逐出境。此前，危地马拉一直是玛雅语使用者的专属领地。这就是为什么许多危地马拉地名实际上都源自纳瓦特尔语：美丽的阿蒂特兰湖的名字意为“水边”，或者用当地的特苏图希尔语来说，是“chi-nim-ya ”，意为“在大水边”；危地马拉本身是“Quauh-temal-lan”，意为“树木感染之地”，翻译自玛雅语“k'i-chee”（至今仍用来指代该国最大的语言群体，传统拼写为Quiche）。城镇名称中常见的后缀“-tenango”源自拉丁语“ tenan-co”，意为“在……的城堡中”：例如，Quetzaltenango，意为“在绿咬鹃的城堡中”；Huehuetenango，意为“在古老的城堡中”；Momostenango，意为“在教堂的城堡中”；Chichicastenango，意为“在苦荨麻的城堡中”。如今，这些地名都带有明显的异域风情，因为在500公里外的特佩万特佩克地峡以东和以南，纳瓦特尔语已不再使用。特拉斯卡拉人也将纳瓦特尔语带到了北方，至少到达了萨卡特卡斯；而在西方，传教士使用纳瓦特尔语向米却肯州的塔拉斯坎人传教（米却肯州在纳瓦特尔语中意为“有鱼之地”），而米却肯州从未属于阿兹特克帝国的版图。 ⁴⁷

In some places, the Spanish spread the lenguas generales beyond the range of the pre-Columbian empires that had created them. Under the Spanish, and with the aid of their Nahuatl-speaking allies, notably from Tlaxcallan, who were only too happy to dispossess the Aztecs, Nahuatl spread down into Guatemala, which had hitherto been a preserve of Mayan speakers. This is why so many Guatemalan place names are actually of Nahuatl origin: the name of the beautiful Lake Atitlán means ‘round the water’, or as they put it in the local Tz’utujil, chi-nim-ya’, ‘by the great water’; Guatemala itself is Quauh-temal-lan, ‘tree-infection-place’, translating the Mayan expression k’i-chee’ (still used to refer to the largest language group in the country, traditionally spelt Quiche). A common ending for town names, -tenango, is from… tenan-co, ’ in the citadel of … ’ : Quetzaltenango, ’ in the citadel of the quetzal bird’, Huehuetenango, ‘in the old citadel’, Momostenango, ‘in the citadel of the chapel’, Chichicastenango, ‘in the citadel of the bitter nettle’. These all have a decidedly foreign ring today, when Nahuatl is no longer spoken east or south of the isthmus of Tepehuantepec, 500 kilometres away. The Tlaxcalans also took their Nahuatl northward, at least to Zacatecas; and in the west, Nahuatl was used by missionaries to preach to the Tarascans of Michoacán (Nahuatl Michuahkan ‘place of those who have fish’), which had never been part of the Aztec domains.⁴⁷

在秘鲁，证据表明，克丘亚语早在西班牙征服之前就已经传播开来，无论是通过15世纪图帕克·尤潘基的征服，还是钦查商人的旅行，其传播范围都远至现代哥伦比亚的北部边界。⁴⁸印加人也与南部的图库曼地区建立了一定程度的经济联系：那里有道路、驻军站和客栈，或许还有类似于印加帝国常见的周期性劳役（mit'a）。但这种联系对语言的影响尚不明确。无论如何，在西班牙的引导下，克丘亚语向南传播得更加稳固。秘鲁人向南净迁徙到现代玻利维亚的波托西地区，以支持当地大规模的银矿开采。后来，克丘亚语也传播到现代阿根廷的图库曼省、圣地亚哥德尔埃斯特罗省和科尔多瓦省。在所有这些地区，西班牙人的入侵都伴随着大量秘鲁人和混血人种的到来；因此，帝国语言的传播倾向于克丘亚语而非西班牙语。传教活动也是一个因素。1582-1583年的利马会议制定了美洲皈依基督教的总体计划，传教士们发现，像其他地方一样，用通用语言传教更为便捷。在那个时期，克丘亚语必然仍然带有印加的威望。^*到十八世纪初，图库曼地区已经失去了原有的语言，基本上成为一个克丘亚语地区^。49

In Peru, the evidence suggests that Quechua had already been spread, whether through the fifteenth-century conquests of Tupac Yupanqui or the travels of Chincha merchants, as far north as the borders of modern Colombia well before the Spanish conquest.⁴⁸ The Incas had also established some level of economic link with the Tucumán area to their south: there were roads, garrison stations and inns, and perhaps periodic labour corvées (mit’ a) of the type familiar in their empire. But the linguistic impact of this is unclear. At any rate, under Spanish tutelage the language was to consolidate its spread southward. There was net migration from Peru south into the Potosí area of modern Bolivia, to support the vast development of silver mining there. Later, Quechua also spread into the provinces of Tucumán, Santiago del Estero and Córdoba of modern Argentina. In all this area, Spanish inroads were accompanied by larger numbers of attendant Peruvians and mestizos; and so the linguistic advance of empire tended to be Quechua rather than Spanish. Missionary activity too was a factor, after the Council of Lima in 1582-3, which had set out a general plan for the conversion of the Americas: as everywhere, the friars found it more expeditious to preach in the lengua general, and in this period Quechua must still have had some flavour of Inca prestige attached to it.^* By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Tucumán had lost its previous languages, and was essentially a Quechua-speaking region.⁴⁹

国家的解决方案：西班牙化

The state’s solution: Hispanización

那些不努力推广和普及卡斯蒂利亚语，不确保印第安人学会读写卡斯蒂利亚语，反而让他们继续使用自己语言的教会牧师，在我看来，就是土著居民、他们的政策和理性的公开敌人……

The ministers of the church who do not attempt to advance and extend the Castilian language and take care that the Indians know how to read and write in it, leaving them shut up in their own language, are to my thinking the declared enemies of the natives, of their policy and rationality…

Antonio de Lorenzana y Buitrón，墨西哥大主教，1769 年⁵⁰

Antonio de Lorenzana y Buitrón, archbishop of Mexico, 1769⁵⁰

十八世纪中叶，西班牙统治美洲长达十代之久，许多西班牙人对西班牙语远未普及感到失望。罗森布拉特估计，1810年西班牙殖民地中，以土著语言为母语的人与从小学习西班牙语的人之比约为三比一：900万农村印第安人与300万白人、克里奥尔人和梅斯蒂索人。 ⁵¹墨西哥大主教安东尼奥·德·洛伦萨纳·伊·布伊特龙——他本人自然是西班牙人——尤其重视语言问题：

In the middle of the eighteenth century, when Spain had dominated the Americas for fully ten generations, many Spaniards were disappointed in the very much less than universal spread of their language. Rosenblat estimates that in the Spanish colonies in 1810 there were three mother-tongue speakers of an indigenous language for every one who had grown up with Spanish: 9 million rural Indians to 3 million whites, creoles and mestizos.⁵¹ The archbishop of Mexico, Antonio de Lorenzana y Buitrón—himself a Spaniard, naturally—took the language question particularly to heart:

这是一个永恒的真理：维护印第安人的语言是那些命运和学识仅限于说自幼习得的语言的人的愚蠢之举；它是一种传染病，使印第安人与西班牙人的对话格格不入；它是一种瘟疫，侵蚀着我们神圣信仰的教义；它是一种偏见，以语言的差异将某些村庄的土著居民与其他村庄的土著居民区分开来；它增加了教区的成本，因为教区需要在同一辖区内配备不同语言的牧师；它使主教的治理变得不可能^。52

This is a constant truth: the maintenance of the language of the Indians is a folly [un capricho] of men, whose fortune and learning is restricted to speaking that tongue learnt even as a child: it is a contagion, which separates the Indians from the conversation of the Spaniards; it is a plague, which infects the Dogmas of our Holy Faith; it is a prejudicial marker to separate the natives of some villages from others by diversity of their tongues; it is an increased cost for the parishes, which require ministers of different languages in their same domain; and it is an impossibility for the governance of the bishops.⁵²

1769年，他在致墨西哥总教区的一封牧函中提议废除所有土著语言，强制使用西班牙语。他生于启蒙时代，正值理性对全人类的普世益处日益受到广泛认可，人们也纷纷提出新的、激进的政策来落实这些益处。几乎同样重要的是，他深受西班牙国王卡洛斯三世的信任。因此，尽管他的提议遭到了当时的墨西哥总督的拒绝（总督认为只需要更好地执行现有的（已有两百年历史的）西班牙语教学标准），随后又遭到了整个西印度群岛委员会的拒绝（理由更为传统，即特伦托会议（1545 年）明确要求用当地语言教授福音），国王仍然下令并签署了 1770 年 4 月 16 日的致命皇家法令，其中关键的一句话是：“为了立即消灭上述地区使用的不同语言，并统一使用卡斯蒂利亚语……”

In 1769, in a pastoral letter to the archdiocese of Mexico, he proposed the abolition of all indigenous languages through the compulsory use of Spanish. He was a child of his time, the era of the Enlightenment, when the universal benefits to humanity of Reason were being ever more widely appreciated, and new, radical, policies were being proposed to give them effect. Almost as important, he had the ear of the king of Spain, Carlos III. As a result, even though his proposal was rejected by the then viceroy of Mexico, who felt that all that was needed was better enforcement of the existing (two-hundred-year-old) standards for teaching Spanish, and then by the full Council of the Indies, on the even more traditional grounds that the Council of Trent (1545) clearly required the teaching of the gospel in natives’ languages, the king nevertheless ordered and signed the fatal royal Cédula of 16 April 1770, whose crucial phrase runs: ‘in order that at once may be achieved the extinction of the different languages used in the said domains, and the sole use of Castilian …’

该法令指出，此前皇家颁布的在所有村庄设立卡斯蒂利亚语学校的命令收效甚微。但实际上，它唯一具体的要求是，主教今后任命牧师时，无需考虑他们是否精通西班牙语以外的其他语言。这项法令不仅适用于墨西哥，而且明确适用于西班牙帝国的每个地区，包括菲律宾。

The decree noted that previous royal commandments for schools in Castilian to be established in all villages had been to little avail. But in fact its only concrete requirement was for bishops to appoint curates henceforth without any concern for their competence in languages other than Spanish. This was directed not just to Mexico, but explicitly to every part of the Spanish empire, including the Philippines.

1782年，第二道法令颁布，要求民事和宗教当局资助卡斯蒂利亚语教师的培养。但这并未在帝国范围内显著改善西班牙语教学。西班牙语的进步虽然真实存在，但却是无形的，几乎正如第一道皇家法令所预想的那样：随着西班牙当局越来越多地、不加选择地使用西班牙语与印第安人交流，印第安人使用本族语言的权利被逐渐剥夺。所有对土著语言教育的官方支持都被撤销；大学里的教授职位被取消；用这些语言撰写的书籍停止出版。墨西哥的法院不再受理用纳瓦特尔语撰写的诉讼。此外，同期教会在帝国的影响力和权力也在下降，这一过程通常归因于启蒙运动在欧洲的传播，但最显著的体现是1767年耶稣会士被驱逐出他们在南美洲的所有教区。 ^†印第安人不仅失去了对其语言的制度性支持，也失去了他们的欧洲保护者——修士和神父。这些趋势最终导致了所有通用语的衰落。

The decree was followed up in 1782 by a second, which required civil and religious authorities to provide for the funding of masters in Castilian. This did not lead to any wide-scale improvement in the teaching of Spanish in the empire. The gains for Spanish, though real, came about by default, almost as the first royal Cédula had imagined: Indians’ use of their own languages was simply wished away, as the Spanish authorities increasingly addressed them in Spanish, willy-nilly. All official support for education in the indigenous languages came to be withdrawn; professorial chairs in the universities were discontinued; books written in them ceased to be published. Courts in Mexico ceased to entertain pleas written in Nahuatl. Furthermore, the same period was seeing a decline in the influence and the power of the Church within the empire, a process generally attributed to the spread of the Enlightenment in Europe, but evidenced most dramatically in the expulsion of the Jesuits from all their reducciones in South America in 1767.^† The Indians were losing not only the institutional supports for their languages, but also their European protectors, the friars and priests. These trends turned out to be sufficient to bring on the decline of all the lenguas generales.

但自由启蒙运动并未止步于此，它试图将西班牙语的光芒照进那些被认为因土著母语而蒙蔽的心灵角落，并推动公民社会摆脱对教会的束缚。其下一步，在十九世纪初革命战争的推动下，是争取西班牙殖民地的政治独立。不出所料，最令西班牙统治持续下去感到恼火的是那些欧化的精英阶层——克里奥尔人。他们在礼仪和语言上与统治阶级最为接近，但由于生于美洲这一偶然因素，他们永远处于统治阶级的从属地位。尽管他们乐于招募混血人、黑人和印第安人加入他们的阵营，但他们几乎从未准备将土著语言视为他们想要建立的新国家身份的标志：相反，克里奥尔人向所有人提供了一种基于共同语言——西班牙语——的无差别公民身份。拉丁美洲的民族主义运动难以接纳地方语言，他们甚至将一些使用人数较多的语言视为分裂的根源，而非西班牙所不具备的统一力量。显然，语言的演变因地域而异，其复杂程度远超本文所能涵盖；拉丁美洲各国的情况不胜枚举。我们只能简要探讨西班牙语与现存的大型本土语言竞争的两个案例。

But liberal enlightenment did not stop here, with the attempt to shed Spanish vernacular light into the corners of minds supposedly darkened by indigenous mother tongues, and a growing freedom of civil society from obligations to the Church. Its next step, enforced by revolutionary wars in the early nineteenth century, was to be towards political independence for the Spanish colonies. Unsurprisingly, the forces that found continued Spanish rule most irksome were the Europeanised elites, the criollos, closest in their manners and language to the ruling classes, but for ever subordinate to them through the accident of their birth in the Americas. Although they were happy to recruit mestizos, blacks and Indians to their cause, they were almost never prepared to see the indigenous languages as badges of authenticity for the new nations they wished to establish: rather, the criollos offered everyone an undifferentiated citizenship based on a common language, Spanish. The nationalist movements of Latin America found it hard to embrace local languages, seeing even the bigger languages as sources of division, rather than of a unity alien to Spain. Evidently, language outcomes have varied in the face of local conditions, too multiform even to review here; there are at least as many stories as there are Latin American nations. We must be content to look briefly at just two cases, where Spanish has competed with large surviving indigenous languages.

在墨西哥，自1821年独立以来，印第安人的存在始终构成了一种知识上的尴尬，他们独特的身份是对启蒙运动平等主义的持续反驳：“我们的政治制度不区分黑人、混血人和印第安人”。 ⁵³ 在这方面，大多数拉丁美洲国家的情况都很典型。1813年，革命领袖莫雷洛斯曾援引墨西哥人的历史来激励他的新独立宣言：“莫克特胡索马、卡卡马特辛、库奥蒂莫特辛、希科滕卡特尔和卡特松齐的亡灵啊，正如你们曾经庆祝被阿尔瓦拉多的奸诈之剑屠杀的壮举一样，现在也请庆祝你们的子孙团结起来，为你们所遭受的罪行和暴行复仇的喜悦时刻……” ⁵⁴

In Mexico, since independence in 1821, the existence of Indians has always constituted a kind of intellectual embarrassment, their separate identity acting as a standing refutation of Enlightenment egalitarianism: ‘our political institutions do not distinguish between blacks, mestizos or Indians’.⁵³ In this respect, it is typical of most Latin American countries. In 1813, the revolutionary leader Morelos had appealed to the Mexica past to inspire his new Declaration of Independence: ‘Spirits of Moctehuzoma, Cacamatzin, Cuauhtimotzin, Xicotencatl and Catzonzi, as once you celebrated the feat in which you were slaughtered by the treacherous sword of Alvarado, now celebrate the happy moment in which your sons have united to avenge the crimes and outrages committed against you … ‘⁵⁴

但根据1856年的《莱尔多法》，印第安人对其土地的集体权利被废除。1916年，M. Gamío在《锻造祖国》（ Forjando Patria）一书中写道，解决“印第安人问题”的办法在于“将这些人吸引到他们一直视为敌人的另一个社会群体中，将他们纳入其中，使两者融合，简而言之，就是创造一个语言和文化都统一的、连贯的同质民族”。 ⁵⁵ 然而，矛盾的是，在墨西哥，这种观点被称为“印第安主义”（indigenismo）；它重视土著语言和文化，但只重视纳瓦特尔语和玛雅语这两个主要的声望群体，并且仅仅将其视为过去文化辉煌的民族象征。毫不意外，这正是自独立以来西班牙语使用量增长的思想背景：1810年，西班牙有670万居民，其中45%是西班牙人或混血儿（据推测会说西班牙语），⁵⁶而到1995年，人口增至9580万，其中高达88%的人以西班牙语为母语^。57

But by the Lerdo Law of 1856, communal rights of Indians to their lands were dissolved. In 1916 M. Gamío wrote in Forjando Patria (’Forging the Fatherland’) that the solution to the ‘Indian problem’ lay in ‘attracting these individuals toward the other social group which they have always considered the enemy, incorporating them, blending the two together, in short creating a coherent and homogeneous national race unified both in language and culture’.⁵⁵ Paradoxically, in Mexico this view is characterised as ’indigenismo’; it values indigenous language and culture, but only the two major prestige groupings Nahuatl and Maya, and only as a kind of national credential of past cultural glory. Less surprisingly, it has been the intellectual background to precipitate growth in the use of Spanish since independence: if in 1810 there were 6.7 million inhabitants, 45 per cent of them Spaniards or mestizos presumably speaking Spanish,⁵⁶ by 1995 there were 95.8 million, with fully 88 per cent of them first-language speakers of that language.⁵⁷

与之形成鲜明对比的是，巴拉圭独树一帜，其早期建立的西班牙语和瓜拉尼语双语现象从未出现衰退迹象。这种双语现象可以追溯到殖民地建立之初，当时亚松森因西班牙男性与瓜拉尼语女性的比例极高而被誉为“穆罕默德的天堂”。 ⁵⁸在整个西班牙帝国中，巴拉圭独树一帜，即使在其唯一的城市亚松森，也从未出现过一个依靠与西班牙语世界其他地区而非本国交流而生活的都市精英群体。巴拉圭地处偏远，既没有海岸线也没有友好邻邦，这种与世隔绝的状态似乎在独立后依然延续至今。巴拉圭历任总统都能流利地说这两种语言。事实上，瓜拉尼语和西班牙语似乎已经发展出一种相互依存的关系，如同舞台上的双人戏：西班牙语扮演着聪明有教养的兄弟（culto, desarrollado，或瓜拉尼语中的iõarandu），而瓜拉尼语则扮演着可爱却不讲原则的“小混混”（Guarango, que no tiene principios，瓜拉尼语中的tavi）。在1864年和1932年与巴拉圭邻国的两场战争中，瓜拉尼语发挥了重要作用，鼓舞了士气，也保障了秘密行动；长期以来，在人们的印象中，瓜拉尼语与民族主义和科罗拉多党联系在一起，以此对抗自由党令人不安的自由市场理念。 ⁵⁹ 瓜拉尼语有时（在自由党执政时期）会受到官方的打压；但在社会各个层面，它仍然是家庭学习的语言，而西班牙语则是学校里学习的典型语言。 1967年制宪会议上，瓜拉尼语和西班牙语都被宣布为国家语言，但西班牙语被指定为官方语言。1996年，在500万巴拉圭人中，95%的人据说能流利地说瓜拉尼语，其中52%的人实际上只会说瓜拉尼语；而据说只有2%的人只会说西班牙语^。60

In Paraguay, by contrast, and uniquely, the bilingualism early established between Spanish and Guaraní has never begun to slip. It goes far back, to the earliest days of the colony, when Asunción was known as the ‘Paradise of Mahomet’ because of the highly favourable proportion of Spanish men to Guaraní-speaking women.⁵⁸ Uniquely in the Spanish empire, the country never had, even in its one city, Asunción, an urban elite who lived through contact with the rest of the Spanish-speaking world, rather than their own country. The isolation of the nation, cut off without a coastline or friendly neighbours, seems to have perpetuated this, even after independence. Every president of the country has been able to speak both languages. In fact, the two seem to have evolved a mutual dependency, like a stage double act, with Spanish cast as the smart, cultured brother (culto, desarrollado, or in Guaraní iõarandu) and Guaraní the lovable but unprincipled oik (Guarango, que no tiene principios, in Guaraní tavi). Guaraní did yeoman service, boosting morale and secrecy, in two wars against Paraguay’s neighbours in 1864 and 1932; and it has long had an association in people’s minds with nationalism and the Colorado party, as against the unsettling free-market philosophy of the Liberals.⁵⁹ Guaraní has been subject to official discouragement at times (when the Liberals have been in power); but at all levels of society it has gone on being a language learnt in the home, with Spanish the language acquired characteristically at school. In the 1967 Constitutional Congress, both were declared national languages, but Spanish was singled out as the official language. In 1996, of 5 million Paraguayans 95 per cent were said to be fluent in Guaraní, 52 per cent indeed monolingual in it; only 2 per cent were said to be monolingual in Spanish.⁶⁰

总的来说，西班牙语在美洲的渗透可谓险些失败。尽管在美洲大陆居住了两个多世纪，并占据了精英阶层的主导地位，但西班牙语社会——尽管不断有来自伊比利亚半岛的移民注入——却并未在殖民地扎根。直到18世纪末，西班牙人仍然保持着一种异族精英的身份，而混血人口则在不断增长。他们受益于前人，特别是墨西哥人和印加人，在其领土内实现的语言统一，并利用这种统一加速了对征服地的经济剥削，以及他们认为足以证明其存在正当性的传教活动。然而，恰恰在他们享有这些优势的地方，他们却没有建立起一种属于他们自己的通用语。这种情况与拜占庭希腊对中东的统治有着惊人的相似之处。从地中海到波斯湾，阿拉姆语仍然是当地居民的通用语言。因此，穆斯林征服的冲击足以在短短几代人的时间里，抹去希腊一千年统治时期留下的所有语言痕迹。（参见第六章“衰落的迹象”，第257页。）

The general verdict on the penetration of Spanish into the Americas must be that it has had a narrow escape. Despite over two centuries of residence, and elite dominance, in the continent, Spanish-speaking society—constantly refreshed as it was by immigration from the Iberian peninsula—did not put down deep roots in the colonies. Until the late eighteenth century, the Spanish maintained themselves as an alien elite, with the mestizos as a growing body. They had benefited from the linguistic unification of their domains that had been achieved by their predecessors, especially the Mexica and the Incas, and used it to accelerate the economic exploitation of their conquests, and the missionary duties that they felt justified their presence. But precisely where they had enjoyed these advantages, they had not provided a universal lingua franca of their own. The case is strangely reminiscent of the Byzantine Greek domination of the Middle East. Aramaic remained the language of the people from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. And so the shock of Muslim conquest had been sufficient to blot out, within a couple of generations, all linguistic trace of a millennium of Greek rule. (See Chapter 6, ‘Intimations of decline’, p. 257.)

尾声：横跨太平洋

Coda: Across the Pacific

西班牙语对西班牙殖民地的语言影响力之浅薄，在菲律宾的例子中可见一斑。美西战争（1898年）的失败给菲律宾带来了类似的冲击。我们之前已经指出（参见《前所未有的帝国》，第334页），这个殖民地在很多方面都与美洲不同：它并没有因为西班牙的征服而导致土著人口突然因瘟疫而锐减，也从未吸引过大量来自西班牙——或者任何其他西班牙殖民地——的自由职业移民。与美洲一样，当地语言也被接受为传播福音的媒介；印刷术在菲律宾的兴起与更先进的美洲殖民地墨西哥和秘鲁几乎同时：1593年，印刷术的首部作品是《基督教教义》（Doctrina Cristiana, en lengua espaõola y tagala），这是一部西班牙语和塔加洛语的平行文本。⁶¹由于西班牙定居者很少，经济发展也不太好，因此在官方圈子之外使用西班牙语的动力很小。

How superficial the linguistic hold of Spanish could be on Spain’s colonies can be seen in the case of the Philippines, where a similar shock was delivered through defeat in the Spanish-American War (1898). We have already noted (see ‘An unprecedented empire’, p. 334) that this colony was in important ways unlike the Americas: it had not responded to Spanish conquest with a sudden epidemic-induced collapse of native population, and it had never attracted significant numbers of free-enterprise immigrants from Spain—or indeed any of the other Spanish colonies. As in the Americas, the local languages had been accepted as the medium for preaching the gospel; printing had started in the Philippines at much the same time as in the more advanced American colonies, Mexico and Peru: in 1593, a wood-block edition of Doctrina Cristiana, en lengua espaõola y tagala, a parallel text in Spanish and Tagalog, was its first product.⁶¹ Since there were few Spanish settlers, and little serious economic development, there was small inducement for the Spanish language to be used outside official circles.

尽管如此，后来还是出现了一些传播西班牙语知识的重要努力。卡洛斯三世于1770年颁布的皇家法令（Cédula）同样适用于菲律宾和美洲，其继任者卡洛斯四世于1794年9月20日颁布了补充法令，正式规定所有人必须免费接受西班牙语教育。然而，由于缺乏必要的资源，这项法令始终未能真正落实。尽管如此，皇家法令仍在不断颁布。1815年3月，西班牙强制推行西班牙语小学教育。1860年，军队中也设立了学校：西班牙士官负责教授驻菲部队。到了19世纪，菲律宾的入学率已经相当可观：1840年，每33名居民中就有一名儿童入学，这一数字与同年法国的情况相当，即每38名居民中就有一名儿童入学（而俄罗斯则为每4000名居民中就有一名儿童入学）。 ⁶²

Nevertheless, there was a significant belated effort to spread knowledge of it. Carlos Ill’s royal Cédula of 1770 applied just as much to the Philippines as to the Americas, and on 20 September 1794 his successor, Carlos IV, issued a supplement to it, officially making instruction in Spanish free and compulsory for all. This never overcame the lack of resources needed to make it happen. The royal decrees kept coming, however. In March 1815 compulsory primary education in Spanish was imposed. In 1860, schools were instituted in the army: Spanish non-commissioned officers were to instruct their Philippine troops. In the nineteenth century, fairly respectable levels of school attendance were being achieved: in 1840, one child attended for every thirty-three inhabitants, a figure comparable with France in the same year: one child per thirty-eight inhabitants (and in Russia, one child per four thousand).⁶²

但1898年美国剥夺西班牙人对菲律宾的统治权并占领该国，揭示了西班牙人成功建立的语言文化是多么脆弱。1903年的人口普查显示，在750万人口中，只有不到80万人（11%）会说西班牙语。15年后，说英语的人数已经超过了说西班牙语的人数：英语人口为896,258人，而说西班牙语的人数为757,463人。70年后，即1988年，根据《阿戈斯蒂尼日历》（Calendario Atlante de Agostini）的数据，西班牙语使用者仅占3%；相比之下，1975年的人口普查显示，英语使用者占51% ^。

But the American dispossession of the Spaniards and occupation of the Philippines in 1898 revealed how fragile was the linguistic culture that the Spaniards had succeeded in planting. The census of 1903 showed that less than 800,000 (11 per cent) of the 7.5 million population spoke Spanish. Fifteen years later, the number who spoke English had already overtaken them: 896,258 for English, as against 757,463 for Spanish. Seventy years later, in 1988, the figures from the Calendario Atlante de Agostini put the Spanish speakers at 3 per cent;⁶³ this can be compared with the 51 per cent reported able to speak English in the 1975 census.

1987年宪法首次将西班牙语从官方语言名单中移除。塔加洛语（经重新命名并积极发展为“菲律宾语”）如今承担了这一角色（据1991年世界年鉴统计，约有62%的人口使用塔加洛语），英语则“在法律另有规定之前”仍为官方语言。西班牙语和阿拉伯语现在“以自愿和可选的方式推广”。^*

In the 1987 constitution, for the first time Spanish was no longer listed as an official language of the country. Tagalog (recast, and actively developed as ‘Pilipino’ or ‘Filipino’) now plays that role (available to some 62 per cent of the population, according to World Almanac 1991), with English ‘until otherwise provided by the law’. Spanish is now, along with Arabic, ‘promoted on a voluntary and optional basis’.^*

英语在此超越西班牙语的崛起，与二十世纪英语在全球范围内的普遍发展密不可分，这一点将在第十二章（“席卷全球”，第505页）中进行探讨。美国移民所拥有的既有学校网络也功不可没。相比之下，西班牙人几个世纪以来都白手起家，苦心发展教育体系。此外，美国用于海外活动的资金也远超西班牙。

The progress of English over the prone figure of Spanish here cannot be separated from the general worldwide advance of English in the twentieth century, which will be examined in Chapter 12 (’The world taken by storm’, p. 505). Something too must have been due to the pre-existing network of schools available to the American incomers. Contrast the Spanish, labouring for centuries to build them up from a zero base. It is also true that much greater funds were available for US overseas activities than had ever been for those of Spain.

但讽刺的是，这种情况与同期北美英语和西班牙语的竞争形成了鲜明对比。在北美，西班牙语——尤其是其在墨西哥、中美洲、古巴和波多黎各等地传播的版本——在许多大城市和美国西南部的大部分地区，都在以牺牲英语为代价而发展壮大。^†然而，所有这些发展都凸显了语言传播的真正决定因素：人口增长和人口流动。当官方语言是由国际精英人为创造，并在当地人口中尽可能广泛传播时，预算越多，语言的使用范围就越广也就不足为奇了。但当人口开始增长时，例如马尼拉大都会的城市人口，其语言（他加禄语）就如同其使用者一样，无论是否使用英语，都逐渐主导了整个国家。

But the situation compares ironically with the contest of English and Spanish in North America in the same period, where if anything Spanish—in its version seeded to Mexico, Central America, Cuba and Puerto Rico—is growing at the expense of English, in many big cities and much of the south-west of the USA.^† All these developments, however, tend to underline the true determinants of language spread: population growth and population movements. When an official language was an artificial thing, created by international elites, and spread as far as possible among local populations, it is understandable that the bigger budget should have created the bigger language. But when the population starts to grow, as the urban population of Metro Manila has, its language (Tagalog) has come to dominate the country just as its speakers have, English or no English.

当一个群体开始向美国经济这个不可抗拒的吸引力靠拢时，就像墨西哥和加勒比海中部地区的人们现在所做的那样，新的语言群体就会开始涌入，即使这意味着侵占世界上最具活力、使用最广泛的语言——英语的核心地带。

And when a population starts to move towards that irresistible attractor, the US economy, as the Mexican and central Caribbean populations now are, new speaker communities will begin to crowd in, even if this means encroaching on the heartland of the most dynamic, and widely spoken, language in the world, English.

^这些奇幻故事是三个世纪前早期浪漫主义英雄史诗的矫揉造作的延伸，例如诺曼法语的《罗兰之歌》和卡斯蒂利亚西班牙语的《熙德之歌》。许多近期的作品都列于塞万提斯的《堂吉诃德》（上半部分出版于1605年）第六章，其中大部分都已被列入焚毁名单。对亚瑟王和圆桌骑士的热情也是欧洲这一现象的一部分。托马斯·马洛礼爵士的《亚瑟之死》于1485年由威廉·卡克斯顿在威斯敏斯特出版。

^* These fantasies were a mannered outgrowth of the heroic lays of early Romance three centuries earlier, such as Chanson de Roland, in Norman French, and Poema de Mio Cid, in Castilian Spanish. Many of the recent titles are listed in ch. 6 of Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (first half published 1605), where most of them are scheduled for burning. Enthusiasm for King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is part of the same European phenomenon. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was published by William Caxton at Westminster in 1485.

^†从语言学角度来看，加利西亚语过去（现在也是）与葡萄牙语非常相似，只是被米尼奥河的河道与葡萄牙语隔开，以及葡萄牙在 1143 年脱离卡斯蒂利亚独立这一政治事实也造成了两者之间的隔阂。

^† Linguistically, Galician was (and is) much the same as Portuguese, divided from it by the course of the River Minho, and the political fact that Portugal became independent of Castile in 1143.

^第三支（非日耳曼语族）阿兰人向西南方向迁徙，而非向东，尽管加泰罗尼亚语的一个流行词源解释是“哥特-阿兰”。汪达尔人在安达卢西亚留下了他们的名字，但后来迁徙到突尼斯，并在随后的穆斯林征服中基本被消灭。

^§ A third (non-Germanic) group, the Alans, went south-west, not east, even if a popular etymology for Catalan is ‘Goth-Alan’. The Vandals left their name in Andalusia, but passed on to Tunisia, and were largely erased by the subsequent Muslim conquest.

^“ ……他们抵达了卢卡亚群岛的一个小岛，当地人称之为瓜纳哈尼岛。”哥伦布，《航海日记》，1492年10月12日，星期五，引自德拉斯·卡萨斯（1957年[约1530年]）。哥伦布起初以为自己身处中国大汗的领地，后来（11月12日）又以为自己到了“印度群岛”。同年12月中旬之后，他不再称遇到的当地人为“印第奥人”，但这个称呼却流传了下来（Sale 1990: 109）。

^* ‘… they reached an islet of the Lucayas, which was called Guanahani in the language of the Indians.’ Columbus, Diario de a bordo, Friday, 12 October 1492, quoted by De las Casas (1957 [c. 1530]). Columbus had at first thought he was within the domain of the Chinese Great Khan, and then (12 November) amid ‘the islands of India’. He no longer called the people he met indios after mid-December of that year, but the name had stuck (Sale 1990: 109).

^† “……这些岛屿居住着卡纳比利人，一个野蛮、未被征服的种族，他们以人肉为食。称他们为食人族也不为过。他们不断与温顺胆怯的印第安人交战，以获取人肉……”吉列尔莫·科马的信，《论子午线岛屿……发现的岛屿》，关于哥伦布第二次航行，1493年11月3日星期日。

^† ‘… These islands are inhabited by Canabilli, a wild, unconquered race which feeds on human flesh. I would be right to call them anthropophagi. They wage unceasing wars against gentle and timid Indians to supply flesh… ’ Letter of Guillermo Coma, De insulis meridiani … nuper inventis, on Columbus’s second voyage, for Sunday, 3 November 1493.

^哥伦布的世界观深受广泛阅读的影响。现存七本带有他亲笔批注的书籍，均收藏于塞维利亚的哥伦布图书馆。这些书籍包括马可·波罗的著作、老普林尼的《自然史》以及其他一些更具想象力的作品。他的儿子费尔南多在其传记的第六章和第七章中也记述了父亲的阅读情况（Sale 1990: 15）。

^* Columbus’s world-view was informed by copious reading. We have seven of his books with his personal annotations, preserved to this day in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville. They include works of Marco Polo and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, and others more fanciful. His son Fernando also gave an account of his father’s reading, in chs 6 and 7 of his biography (Sale 1990: 15).

^尽管最初几个世纪的接触总是涉及将航海者的语言投射到他们登陆的民族身上，但最近我们看到，新的联系可以双向运作，来自被殖民国家的移民群体聚集在曾经的殖民强国的故土，并将他们自己的语言带了过去。

^* Although the contacts over the first few centuries always involved the projection of the mariners’ languages on to the peoples who received their landfalls, more recently we have seen that the new links can work in both directions, as immigrant communities from colonised countries gather in the homelands of once colonial powers, bringing their own languages with them.

^{“ ladino} ”一词，实际上源于西班牙对摩尔人的称呼，它经常用来指懂西班牙语的非西班牙人，最初指印第安人，后来也指非洲奴隶。

^* The word ’ladino’, indeed, carried over from its application to Moors in Spain, was a term often used of non-Spaniards who knew Spanish, first applied to Indians but later also to African slaves.

^*伊斯帕尼奥拉岛、古巴和加勒比海其他岛屿上的人民，是在上一代人发现的，他们立即被自封的西班牙统治者强迫为奴。他们使用的语言太多，而使用者又太少，而且总的来说，他们消亡得太快，以至于传教活动无法开展。

^* The people in Hispaniola, Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean islands, discovered in the previous generation, and immediately pressed into servitude by self-appointed Spanish masters, had spoken too many languages with too few speakers, and by and large died off too quickly, for a missionary effort to become established.

^†关于这一点的独特性，请参见 Ostler (2004)。几乎所有词典都是从西班牙语译成目标语言，而不是反过来。其目的在于教，而非学：将西班牙人的思想编码并传递给印第安人，而不是试图解读他们可能提出的任何新奇说法。

^† On the uniqueness of this, see Ostler (2004). Almost all the dictionaries are from Spanish into the alien language, not the reverse. The aim is to teach, rather than to learn: to encode a Spaniard’s thought, and so pass it to the Indians, rather than to try to decode anything novel that they might have to say.

^§ Lengua mexicana指的是纳瓦特尔语，它是阿兹特克（墨西哥）帝国的主要通用语，最初也是其继承帝国新西班牙的主要通用语。

^§ Lengua mexicana refers to the Nahuatl language, the principal lingua franca of the Aztec (Mexica) empire, and at first also of its successor empire, New Spain.

^除了错误地解读其中的一些短语，并将它们永久地应用于他“发现”（当然是以西班牙王室的名义宣称）的土地之外， Ekab kotoc（我们来自埃卡布）变成了 Cabo（科托切角），并沿用至今。而且，如果我们遵循迭戈·德·兰达（《尤卡坦事务记》，第二章，约成书于1566年）的说法， ciu yetel ceh than（他们称之为火鸡和鹿的土地）最终演变成了“尤卡坦”。

^* Other than to misidentify some phrases in it, and apply them permanently to the lands he was ‘discovering’ (and of course claiming in the name of the Spanish Crown). Ekab kotoc, ‘we are from Ekab’, became Cabo (cape) Cotoche, its name to this day. And, if we follow Diego de Landa (Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, ch. ii, written c.1566), ciu yetel ceh than, ‘They call it land of turkeys and deer’, ended up as ‘Yucatán’.

^*瓜拉尼语之所以得名，是因为欧洲人（1526-1529 年随塞巴斯蒂安·卡伯特）遇到的第一批讲这种语言的人是拉普拉塔河岛屿和巴拉那河下游的瓜拉尼人。它自己的首选名称是avaõe'e，意为“平原居民的语言”。

^* Guaraní is so called for historical reasons, because the first people whom Europeans (with Sebastian Cabot in 1526-9) met who spoke this language were the Guaraní of the islands in the Río de la Plata and lower reaches of the Paraná. Its own preferred name is avaõe’e, ‘language of the men of the plain’.

^该名称源自动词nawati，意为“开口说话”。我们将沿用基于西班牙语的传统拼写，发音为nawatl。存在一些方言，通常被称为 Nawat 和 Nawal，它们（顾名思义）在最后一个辅音的发音上有所不同。

^* The name is a nominalisation of the verb nawati, ‘to speak up’. We shall stick to the conventional spelling of this name, which is based on Spanish, and so pronounced nawatl. There are dialects, often called Nawat and Nawal, which (as their names show) differ in the pronunciation of this final consonant.

^* x 的发音与英语sh相同，重音落在 i 上，然后是喉塞音： Mēšíhko。

^* The x is authentically pronounced as English sh, and the stress falls on the i, followed by a glottal stop: Mēšíhko.

^†所引用的日期实际上在《墨西哥编年史》（Crónica Mexicayotl）原文中也有同样精确的记载。中美洲众多不同的民族共享一套复杂的、相互交织的历法体系，这套体系容不得丝毫含糊，即使这些历法彼此之间并非总是兼容。

^† The dates quoted are actually specified with equivalent accuracy in the original text of the Crónica Mexicayotl. The many different peoples of central America shared an elaborate system of interlocking calendar cycles which tolerated no vagueness, even if not always compatible with one another.

^*这段措辞与莫特库佐马向科尔特斯致以的正式问候非常相似。参见序言和第一章“内在历史”，第15页。另请注意，根据那里讨论的阿兹特克礼仪的惯例，较年轻的一方，即阿兹特克人，自称为祖父辈。

^* The phraseology is very similar to Motecuhzoma’s formal greetings to Cortés. See Prologue and Chapter 1, ‘An inward history too’, p. 15. Note also that, in accord with the conceits of Aztec etiquette discussed there, the junior party, the Aztecs, represent themselves as the grandfathers.

^克丘亚语的拼写和发音基本与西班牙语相似，但字母 w 和 k 更为常见。因此，õ 的发音类似于canyon中的ny，j 的发音类似于 loch 中的ch 。辅音后的撇号表示声门哽音。与西班牙语发音习惯的一个主要区别在于，q 的发音时小舌位于口腔后部，类似于阿拉伯语；q 前后的 i 发音更接近 [e]，u 的发音更接近 [o]。这正是该语言名称有时写作“Quechua”，有时写作“Quichua”的根本原因。无论如何，第一个 u 只是对西班牙语拼写的一种保留：其发音更接近 [qecwa]。

^* Quechua is basically spelt and pronounced like Spanish, but w and k are common. Hence õ is ny as in canyon, and j is ch in as in loch. An apostrophe after a consonant marks a glottal catch in the voice. A major exception to Spanish convention is that q is pronounced with the uvula at the back of the mouth, as in Arabic; and immediately before or after it i is pronounced more like [e], and u as [o]. This is the fundamental reason why the language’s name is given sometimes as ‘Quechua’, and sometimes as ‘Quichua’. The first u is in any case just a reminiscence of Spanish spelling: the pronunciation is more like [qecwa].

^玛雅语似乎也经历了类似的演变，但与西班牙文学形式的合作或模仿较少。玛雅人并非近期才在本土领袖的领导下统一起来。尽管如此，他们仍然发展出了自己的文学，但这种文学在很大程度上遵循了他们古老传统的规范和内容。它包括《波波尔·乌》中的英雄神话、与一位注定牺牲的战士（拉比纳尔·阿奇）的哀歌式悲剧对话，以及作为传统历书的《奇兰·巴兰之书》。这是一种对基督教统治的地下抵抗形式。

^* Something of the same seems to have happened with the Mayan languages, but with less conscious collaboration with, or aping of, Spanish literary forms. The Mayans had not recently been united under indigenous leaders. Nevertheless, they did develop a literature, but it was one that largely followed the norms and content of their older traditions. It includes the heroic myths of the Popol Vuh, the elegiac and tragic dialogue with a doomed warrior (Rabinal Achi), and the Books of Chilam Balam, which are traditional almanacs. It was a form of underground resistance to Christian domination.

^* Motolinía是他使用的纳瓦特尔语笔名，意思是“贫穷”。这位方济各会修士的原名是弗雷·托里比奥·德·贝纳文特。

^* Motolinía was a Nahuatl pseudonym, adopted by him because it meant ‘poor’. The original name of this Franciscan friar had been Fray Toribio de Benavente.

^*委任统治制度是西班牙美洲殖民地普遍存在的一种经济制度；它是国王授予的一种租赁权，根据该制度，指定的委任统治者有权完全剥削庄园内印第安人的劳动力，唯一的条件是印第安人必须接受宗教教育。

^* The encomienda was an economic institution universal in the Spanish American colonies; it was a leasehold granted by the king, under which a designated encomendero was given full rights to exploit the labour of Indians on an estate, on condition only that the Indians received religious instruction.

^† “神父，这是哪个案子？”

^† ‘Reverend Father, what case is it in?’

^{昔日辉煌的回响至今}仍广泛流传。克丘亚语是耶稣会在巴拉圭传教时使用的十一种语言之一。时至今日，在智利北部的一些小社区以及巴西西部的阿克里州，仍然可以找到克丘亚语的使用痕迹。

^* The echoes of this former majesty are widespread. Quechua was one of the eleven languages used by the Jesuits in their missions in Paraguay. It is also attested to this day, in small communities in the north of Chile, and Acre in the west of Brazil.

^* “para que de una vez se llegue a conseguir el que se extingan los diferentes idiomas de que se usa en losmismos Dominios, y sólo se hable el Castellano …”，引自 Triana y Antorveza (1987: 511)。

^* ’para que de una vez se llegue a conseguir el que se extingan los diferentes idiomas de que se usa en los mismos Dominios, y sólo se hable el Castellano …’, quoted in Triana y Antorveza ( 1987: 511).

^† 1759 年，葡萄牙王室将所有耶稣会士驱逐出巴西。（参见第 11 章“葡萄牙先驱”，第 394 页。）

^† The Portuguese Crown had expelled all Jesuits from Brazil in 1759. (See Chapter 11, ‘Portuguese pioneers’, p. 394.

^*引自 1987 年菲律宾宪法（Quilis 1992: 83）。

^* Quotes from the Philippine constitution of 1987 (cited in Quilis 1992: 83).

^† 2001 年人口普查数据显示，美国西班牙裔人口为 3700 万，占总人口的 13%，是美国最大的少数族裔群体，刚刚超过非裔美国人的 3610 万。西班牙裔是美国唯一一个仍然日常使用其母语西班牙语的少数族裔群体，拥有两个西班牙语电视频道（Univisión 和 Telemundo）以及两百多种西班牙语出版物，总发行量超过 1200 万份（《国家报》，马德里，2003 年 3 月 23 日）。

^† The 2001 census figures place the Hispanic population of the USA at 37 million, 13 per cent of the total, and the largest minority in the country, having just now overtaken the African-Americans’ 36.1 million. The Hispanics are the only US minority to retain routine usage of their heritage language, Spanish, with two TV channels, Univisión and Telemundo, and over two hundred publications with a joint circulation of over 12 million (El País newspaper, Madrid, 23 March 2003).

11

帝国列车：欧洲的海外语言

11

In the Train of Empire: Europe’s Languages Abroad

我们考察了目前世界上人口最多的十种语言（完整的前二十种语言将在第十三章中列出并讨论），发现其中至少有六种语言是在过去五个世纪中随着欧洲全球帝国的扩张而传播开来的：英语、西班牙语、葡萄牙语、俄语、德语和法语。西班牙语是其中传播最早的语言，其传播的显著特点是天主教会发挥了主导作用——尽管这种作用在某种程度上也起到了破坏作用——我们刚刚已经回顾过。英语的传播最为引人注目，其传播似乎在民族主导地位衰落后，全球市场热情占据了主导地位，我们将在下一章中详细讨论。在此之前，我们需要考察其他语言的发展历程，它们都是现代帝国扩张的经典案例，其驱动力源于对财富、探索和民族荣耀的渴望，并且往往伴随着基督教传教士的热忱。

Surveying the world’s current top ten languages by population (the full top twenty are identified and discussed in Chapter 13), we note that no less than six of them have spread through the expansion of European global empires in the past five centuries: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German and French. The spread of Spanish, the earliest of these, distinguished by the leading—though somewhat spoiling—role of the Catholic Church, we have just reviewed. The spread of English, the most spectacular, where global market enthusiasm seems to have taken over just as national dominance left off, we reserve for the next chapter. Before that, we need to consider the careers of the others, so many classic cases of modern imperial expansion, driven by passions for wealth, exploration and national glory, often accompanied by the zeal of Christian missionaries.

语言的故事远比现代欧洲作家（他们通常自鸣得意）的描述更为复杂，也因此更引人入胜。随着帝国势力的扩张，母语的传播绝非必然：例如，我们必须解释一个奇特的现象，即现代印度尼西亚的通用语是马来语的一种形式，而非其统治者荷兰语——荷兰语曾是其统治者两个多世纪以来的语言；此外，某些帝国（例如法国在印度支那、俄罗斯在穆斯林中亚、日本在满洲和朝鲜）的语言影响似乎远不如其他帝国持久。我们需要探究，征服的哪些方面使得语言的传播看似永久，例如葡萄牙语在巴西、法语在刚果、俄语在西伯利亚的传播。内布里哈轻率地断言“语言是帝国的伴侣，它们共同起源、发展、繁荣”，这种说法未免过于武断。 “后来两者的共同衰落”实际上过于简单——它的所有说法都过于片面。

The story of the languages is more ambiguous, and hence more interesting, than is often portrayed in the accounts, usually self-congratulatory, of modern European writers. The expansion of the home language in the train of a growing imperial power was by no means assured: we have to account for the curious fact, for example, that the lingua franca of modern Indonesia is a form of Malay, and not Dutch, the language of its overlords for over two centuries; and the linguistic effects of some imperial presences, for example of France in Indochina, of Russia in Muslim Central Asia, or of Japan in Manchuria and Korea, already seem far less durable than those of others. We need to ask what aspects of a conquest have made a linguistic spread apparently permanent, as that of Portuguese in Brazil, of French in the Congo, or of Russian in Siberia. Nebrija’s glib dictum that ‘language was the companion of empire, and followed it in such a way that jointly they began, grew, flourished; and afterwards joint was the fall of both’ is in fact far too simple—in all its claims.

这些帝国列强对语言的态度，以及他们对语言与文化之间联系的信念程度，往往比西班牙天主教帝国主义者更加以自我为中心：这是他们所处时代的特征。天主教神学是普世的，绝非西班牙人的专属或创造，尽管他们有幸将其传播到美洲。相比之下，劫掠成性的北欧人则认为他们拥有某种特殊的民族天赋，正是这种天赋使他们能够统治这些先前“愚昧无知的野蛮人”。但不可避免的是，由于帝国的缔造者都是务实且往往冷酷无情的人，他们对语言作用的理解也同样务实，甚至肤浅。一种语言最初会以通用语的形式传播，或许是一种相当受限的形式，一种皮钦语，它对使用者的母语做出了各种妥协。语言被视为一种进行商业交易的工具。欧洲语言过去常常被用作商业和政府领域的第二语言，而且现在也常常如此，而传统语言则继续在日常生活中使用。因此，很难将这种语言的传播视为其来源语言社群的传播。

The attitudes to language of these imperial powers, and the degree of their belief in a link between language and culture, tended to be more self-regarding than that of the Spanish Catholic imperialists: that was a feature of their era. Catholic theology had been universal, and in no way a preserve or creation of the Spaniards whose privilege it had been to present it to the Americas. Marauding northern Europeans, by contrast, felt that they did have a particular national gift which accounted for their ability to dominate these previously ‘benighted savages’. But inevitably, since the founders of empires were practical, often hard, men, their appreciation of the role of language too was practical, even superficial. A language would spread first as a kind of lingua franca, perhaps in a quite restricted form, a pidgin, that made all kinds of concessions to the first languages of those who picked it up. A language was seen as a tool for transacting business. European languages were, and often still are, used as second languages in commerce and government, while traditional languages persisted in familiar contexts. As such, the spread of such a language is hard to see as a spread of the linguistic community from which it came.

因此，与其深入探究特定国家特定语言的发展历程，不如将所有这些语言的传播作为一个整体进行比较研究。这样，我们或许能够更好地展现欧洲帝国主义这一全球现象的关键特征。但与此同时，我们也难以准确传达特定语言在异域环境中遭遇的独特体验。

It makes sense, therefore, to look at the spreads of all these languages as a group, comparatively, rather than to go deeply into the stories of particular languages in particular countries. In this way, we can hope that the crucial features of this global phenomenon, European imperialism, will show through. But by the same token, it is harder to convey the individual flavour of a particular language’s encounter with an alien environment.

葡萄牙先驱者

Portuguese pioneers

Sustentava contra ele Vénus bela ,

Afeiçoada à gente Lusitana ,

Por Quantas qualidades via nela

Da antiga táo amada sua Romana；

Nos fortes corações, na grande estrela ,

Quemostraram na terra Tingitana ,

E na língua, na qual quando imagina ,

Comp pouca corrupçáo crě que é a Latina.

Sustentava contra ele Vénus bela,

Afeiçoada à gente Lusitana,

Por quantas qualidades via nela

Da antiga táo amada sua Romana;

Nos fortes corações, na grande estrela,

Que mostraram na terra Tingitana,

E na língua, na qual quando imagina,

Com pouca corrupçáo crě que é a Latina.

美丽的维纳斯向他发声，表达了

对葡萄牙民族的喜爱，因为她从他们身上看到了她从古时深爱的罗马那里

看到的所有品质；在他们勇敢的心中，在他们在休达（他们的第一次征服之地）所展现的伟大星辰中，以及在他们的语言中，在她看来，那语言或许是略有讹变的拉丁语。

Against him spoke up Venus fair

With affection for the race of Portugal

For all the qualities she saw in it

From Rome, that she so loved of old;

In their brave hearts, in the great star,

Which they showed in the land of Ceuta [their first conquest],

And in their tongue, which her imagination

Could take for a somewhat corrupted Latin.

卡蒙斯，^* Os Lusíadas，i.33

Camões,^* Os Lusíadas, i.33

葡萄牙人是第一个将自身及其语言传播到大西洋彼岸，进而走向世界的欧洲强国。他们漫长的海岸线几乎与茫茫大海相连，似乎是他们的渔船队和海盗，而非商人，率先利用了十四世纪出现的伟大航海发明——安装在龙骨上的中央舵、磁罗盘和航海图（可以预先计算出各点之间的航向）。他们得以在大西洋上广泛活动，并不时袭击北非沿岸的异教徒港口。这逐渐成为葡萄牙王室关注的焦点。1415年，葡萄牙王室征服了北非飞地休达。它占领了东大西洋的主要无人居住岛屿，1419 年占领了马德拉岛（意为“木头”，是其先前西班牙语名称Legname的葡萄牙语译名），1427 年占领了亚速尔群岛（意为“苍鹰”）。此后，无论是为了追逐黄金、渔业、宗教皈依者、奴隶还是其他货物，这位被称为“航海家”的、具有远见卓识的亨利王子（infante Dom Henrique）都发起了一系列沿着非洲海岸向南的探险远征，到 1460 年他去世时，已在里斯本以南约 4000 公里（800 里格）的格巴河（今几内亚比绍境内）建立了定居点。

The Portuguese were the first European power to project themselves, and their language, across the Atlantic and hence into the world at large. Their long coastline abuts on to little more than the open sea, and it seems to have been their fishing fleets and pirates, rather than merchants, who first took advantage of the great enabling maritime inventions which became available in the fourteenth century, the central rudder fitted to the keel, the magnetic compass, and the portolan chart, which gave pre-calculated directions from point to point. They were able to range widely in the Atlantic, and occasionally to raid infidel ports on the coasts of North Africa. Gradually this became a matter of import to the Portuguese Crown. It conquered the North African enclave of Ceuta in 1415; and it occupied the main uninhabited islands of the eastern Atlantic, Madeira (’wood’, renamed in a Portuguese translation of its previous Spanish name Legname) in 1419, the Azores (’goshawks’) in 1427. Thereafter, whether in pursuit of gold, fisheries, religious converts, slaves or other goods, the foreign-oriented Prince Henry (infante Dom Henrique), known as the Navigator, initiated a stream of exploratory expeditions southward along the African coast, planting settlements as far south as the Geba river (in modern Guinea-Bissau), some 4,000 kilometres (800 leagues) south of Lisbon, by the time he died in 1460.

他的士兵、水手（以及商人）所说的语言是伊比利亚半岛西侧特有的罗曼语，最初与加利西亚语同源，但（可能自罗马时代起）其发展轨迹与中部（卡斯蒂利亚语）和东部（加泰罗尼亚语）的语言有所不同。这种语言的特点是咝音腭化（sh [š] 和 zh [ž]，而非 s 和 z），元音之间的咝音浊化，以及元音后接 n 和 m 时普遍鼻化（后两个特征也是法语的特征）。此外，这种语言还会弱化非重读元音，甚至省略整个音节。

The language that his soldiers and sailors (and merchants) spoke was the distinctive Romance spoken on the western flank of Iberia, originally one with Galician, which (probably since Roman times) had developed differently from the versions of the centre (Castilian) and the east (Catalan). It was, and is, distinguished by the palatalisation of sibilants (sh [š] and zh [ž], rather than s and z), the voicing of sibilants when they occur between vowels, and by the widespread nasalisation of vowels when they are followed by n and m (the latter two features also characteristic of French). It also reduces vowels when they are unstressed, and even deletes whole syllables.

一个展示葡萄牙语独特之处的例子相当于“你能给我热鸡蛋和面包吗”：拼写为 faz favorite de darme ovos quentes e páo，发音为 faž favorite de darme ，其中卡斯蒂利亚语会说me haces el favorite de darme Huevos calientes y pan , me aθes el faßor de darme weßos kalientes y pan 。

An example that shows much of what makes Portuguese distinctive is the equivalent of ‘will you give me hot eggs and bread’: spelt faz favor de darme ovos quentes e páo, it is pronounced faž favor de darme, where Castilian would have me haces el favor de darme huevos calientes y pan, me aθes el faßor de darme weßos kalientes y pan.

总而言之，葡萄牙语听起来与邻近的卡斯蒂利亚语截然不同，其奇怪的结果是，如今葡萄牙人和巴西人基本上还能听懂西班牙语，而对于大多数西班牙人和讲西班牙语的美国人来说，葡萄牙语却相当难以理解。

All in all, Portuguese had come to sound very different from its neighbour Castilian, with the strange result that nowadays Portuguese and Brazilians can still by and large follow spoken Spanish, while for most Spaniards and Spanish-speaking Americans Portuguese is quite impenetrable.

其故土是伊比利亚半岛南北绵延的一片广阔地带，包括如今西班牙的加利西亚地区。整个地区在713年被（讲阿拉伯语和柏柏尔语的）摩尔人占领，但北部直至杜罗河一带在740年代柏柏尔人与阿拉伯统治者决裂后被基督徒重新夺回。在接下来的四个世纪里，该地区的其余部分逐渐被后来成为基督教王国的莱昂王国的军事扩张所征服；但1128年，国王为了抵御来自非洲的摩尔人阿尔-摩拉维王朝的入侵，将波尔图卡莱（今波尔图）周围的省份划给了他的女婿，这一划分产生了深远的影响。从米尼奥到蒙德戈的葡萄牙地区最终建立了自治（1143年），其公爵也于1179年成为国王。但在接下来的一个世纪里，葡萄牙的扩张（以摩尔人的扩张为代价）仅限于南部。加利西亚人和葡萄牙人虽然仍然说着基本相同的语言，却从此彻底分裂。1248年，首都从波尔图南迁至里斯本（罗马时期为奥利西波）。葡萄牙方言可能受到古卢西塔尼亚语（罗马时代之前在杜罗河以南地区通行）和莫扎拉布语（在摩尔人五百年的统治下发展起来）的影响；但关于方言的地域特征，几乎没有文字记载。葡萄牙语在十二至十四世纪开始出现在书面文字中，并逐渐与抒情诗联系起来，甚至卡斯蒂利亚国王也用葡萄牙语创作抒情诗。

Its homeland was a wide band from north to south in the peninsula, including the area now known as Galicia in modern Spain. The whole region had been taken by (Arabic- and Berber-speaking) Moors in 713, but the northern part down to the Douro was retaken by Christians when the Berbers fell out with their Arab masters in the 740s. The rest of the region yielded very gradually over the next four centuries to the military advance of what became the Christian kingdom of León; but a division made by its king in 1128, assigning the provinces around Portucale (modern Porto) to his son-in-law for purposes of defence against a trying new threat, the onslaught of Moorish Al-moravids from Africa, turned out to have very long-lasting consequences. Portugal, from the Minho to the Mondego, went on to establish its autonomy (1143), its dukes becoming kings (1179); but for the next century its expansion (at the expense of the Moors) was southward only. The Galicians and Portuguese, although still speaking essentially the same language, were sundered permanently. The capital was moved south in 1248 from Porto to Lisbon (Roman Olisippō). The Portuguese dialects may have taken some influence from the old Lusitanian language, which had been spoken south of the Douro up to Roman times, and Mozarabic, which had evolved up under five hundred years of Moorish rule; but there is little written evidence for local features of the vernacular. Emerging on to the written page in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, Portuguese came to be associated particularly with lyric poetry, used for this purpose even by a king of Castile.

E assi Santa Maria	因此，圣母玛利亚
ajudou a seus amigos ,	帮助她的朋友们，
pero que d'outra lei eran ,	尽管他们遵循的是另一套法律，
a britar seus eemigos	为了粉碎他们的敌人，
que, macar que eran muitos ,	虽然他们人数众多，
nonos preçaron dous figos ,	他们连两个无花果都没给他们。
e assi foi ssa mercee	这就是她的仁慈。
de todos mui connoçuda.	已广为人知。

卡斯蒂利亚的阿方索十世 (1221-84)，Cantiga de Santa Maria，no。 181，最后一节

Alfonso X of Castile (1221-84), Cantiga de Santa Maria, no. 181, last stanza

从十六世纪初开始，这种语言开始在非洲和南亚沿海地区传开，并首次在巴西海岸出现。

From the beginning of the sixteenth century this language began to be heard all round the coasts of Africa and southern Asia, and for the first time on the shores of Brazil.

一个亚洲帝国

An Asian empire

1460年航海家亨利去世后，探险活动一度陷入沉寂。但到了1488年，巴尔托洛梅乌·迪亚士终结了葡萄牙人多年来沿非洲海岸缓慢南下的局面，他证明了非洲的南进范围是有限的：谁又能预知好望角之外究竟隐藏着什么呢？此后，从1488年到1498年，探险活动又经历了一段短暂的停滞期，之后才迈出下一步；但探险问题并未被遗忘。事实上，正是在这段时期，葡萄牙试图挑战卡斯蒂利亚对哥伦布在其首次西行（1492年）中新发现的土地的主权。尽管这一主张最终未能成立，但却对葡萄牙大有裨益。1494年，双方签订了《托尔德西利亚斯条约》（葡萄牙语：Tardesilhas），根据条约，葡萄牙获得了佛得角群岛以西370里格子子午线以东的所有土地。最终，这确保了它对巴西的权利。

There had been a lull in exploration after the death of Henry the Navigator in 1460. But then in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias had ended the long years of Portuguese creep down the African coast, by demonstrating that its southward extent was finite: and who knew what lay beyond that last Cabo da Boa Esperança (’Cape of Good Hope’)? There was then another short interlude, from 1488 to 1498, before the next step was taken; but exploration issues were not forgotten. In fact, it was then that Portugal attempted to challenge Castile’s right to the lands newly discovered by Columbus in his first (1492) voyage to the west. The claim was not upheld, but it was ultimately highly beneficial, since when the dispute was resolved by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas (in Portuguese Tardesilhas), Portugal was granted all lands east of a meridian line drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. This, ultimately, guaranteed its right to Brazil.

但当时人们对这一前景的认识还很模糊，甚至根本没有意识到。乍一看，更引人注目的是四年后瓦斯科·达·伽马的成就：他绕过最后一个海角，凯旋而归，傲慢地驶入更广阔的海洋。他终于实现了葡萄牙航海一个世纪以来的最高目标——找到了通往印度的海上航线。这一成就实现了上个世纪最狂妄的梦想，因为葡萄牙人不仅找到了通往印度的航线，还发现自己拥有足够的实力直接获取印度琳琅满目的商品，打破了穆斯林中间商几个世纪以来的垄断。然后，令人难以置信的是，另一份巨大的财富又落入了他们的手中。为了迅速利用在印度的新机遇，他们采取了一条绕道非洲南端的航线：结果，他们在1500年4月22日发现了巴西。现在，他们不仅拥有了在新大陆建立帝国的基础，还独享了旧世界最奢华的市场。葡萄牙企业当时真是风光无限。

But this prospect was dimly appreciated, if at all, at the time. Far more striking, at first blush, was the achievement four years later of Vasco da Gama when he rounded that last cape, and sailed triumphantly, and arrogantly, into the ocean beyond: at long last, he had achieved the highest goal of a century of Portuguese navigation, and found the sea route to India. This achievement turned out to fulfil the most extravagant hopes of the previous century, for besides finding their way to India the Portuguese found that they also had enough strength to secure direct access to its fabulous merchandise, breaking the centuries-old monopoly of Muslim middlemen. And then, incredibly and immediately, another great prize fell into their laps. Acting swiftly to exploit their new Indian opportunity, they happened to take a roundabout course to the southern tip of Africa: the result was the discovery of Brazil, on 22 April 1500. Now they had the basis for an empire in the New World, as well as exclusive access to the most luxurious market of the Old. Fortune was really smiling on Portuguese enterprise.

在新世纪的大部分时间里，葡萄牙的贸易繁荣持续至今。到世纪末，葡萄牙在印度洋沿岸以及更远的马来亚和南海等战略要地建立了众多利润丰厚的贸易据点，并筑有堡垒和舰队进行保护。东非有七个据点，阿曼湾有六个，印度西海岸有十五个，锡兰（今斯里兰卡）有四个，印度东海岸有两个。马六甲、马加萨、特尔纳特、蒂多雷、帝汶和澳门都曾是葡萄牙的殖民地。

It continued to smile for most of the rest of the new century. By the end of it, there were profitable Portuguese trading settlements, protected by fortresses and fleets, all along the coast of the Indian Ocean, and at strategic points beyond, in Malaya and the South China Seas. There were seven settlements in east Africa, six on the Gulf of Oman, fifteen on the western coast of India, four in Ceylon, and two on the eastern coast of India. Malacca, Macassar, Ternate, Tidore, Timor and Macao were all Portuguese possessions.

尽管他们从未实现所追求的完全贸易垄断，但在一两个世纪的时间里，印度洋几乎成了葡萄牙人的内海。与公元前一千年的腓尼基人和希腊人一样，他们也没有试图控制内陆地区。

Although they never achieved the full trade monopoly they were seeking, the Indian Ocean for a century or two was almost a Portuguese lake. Like the Phoenicians and Greeks of the first millennium BC, they did not attempt to control the hinterlands.

但与腓尼基人和希腊人不同，他们的兴趣远不止于利益和冒险：在军事和商业扩张之后，他们开始致力于宗教皈依，并于1512年在莫桑比克、1534年在果阿、1558年在科钦、1558年在马六甲、1575年在澳门、1606年在印度东部的梅利亚普尔等地建立了天主教教区；他们甚至尝试将信仰传播到葡萄牙安全的贸易站之外，例如1555年的埃塞俄比亚、1588年的富奈（即日本）和1659年的东京（即越南）。如同当时在新大陆更为脆弱的领土上活动的西班牙同胞一样，葡萄牙人决心捍卫教皇对他们的信任，以及他们自身对基督教上帝的信仰。

But unlike those Phoenicians and Greeks, they were interested in something beyond profit and adventure: after military and commercial expansion came a drive for religious conversion, and Catholic dioceses were set up in Mozambique in 1512, Goa in 1534, Cochin in 1558, Malacca in 1558, Macao in 1575, Meliapore (in eastern India) in 1606; there was even an attempt to spread the faith beyond the shelter of secure Portuguese trading posts, in Ethiopia in 1555, in Funay (i.e. Japan) in 1588, and Tonkin (i.e. Vietnam) in 1659. Like their Spanish cousins at that time in the far more vulnerable territories of the New World, the Portuguese were determined to vindicate the Pope’s faith in them, and their own faith in the Christian God.

除了刻意传播上帝的福音之外，葡萄牙人也必然在传播他们自己的信仰。这种以商业为主导、以信仰为支撑的扩张所带来的语言影响错综复杂。但它预示着，随着其他欧洲国家效仿葡萄牙的步伐，这种海上帝国主义将会造成怎样的传播。

And besides deliberately attempting to spread the word of God, the Portuguese were inevitably also spreading their own. The linguistic effects of this commerce-led, and faith-reinforced, expansion were complex. But they give a foretaste of the kind of spread that this ship-borne imperialism would engender as different European nations followed in the Portuguese wake.

首先，葡萄牙语是当时在港口城市及其周边地区设立的常驻机构、小型侨民社区以及堡垒和贸易站中使用的语言。这本身并没有什么特别之处：毕竟，移民们最终还是会用自己的语言与同胞交流，并在新家园安顿下来后，至少会将这种语言传给一些子女和仆人，尤其是在他们与同胞保持定期联系的情况下——而与欧洲的贸易正是所有这些葡萄牙人定居点的根本原因，直到17世纪中叶，他们仍在积极应对日益激烈的竞争。（从1550年到17世纪30年代，这条“印度航线”平均每年有五艘船。¹ ^）他们早期抵达所带来的震撼和随之而来的声望，甚至可能在一段时间内鼓励其他人与他们交往，并向他们学习；同样，基督教在亚洲首次传播后的头几代人中最具吸引力，但一旦它像它试图取代的印度教、佛教和伊斯兰教一样广为人知，它的发展就停滞不前了。

First of all, Portuguese was the language used in the fortresses and trading units that were set up as permanent agencies, small expatriate communities in port cities and their surrounds. This was not in itself very significant: inevitably, after all, emigrants go on using their own language to their own kind, and pass it on to at least some of their children and servants when they establish themselves in households in their new homes, especially if they are keeping in regular touch with their countrymen—and trade with Europe was the very raison d’ ětre for all these Portuguese settlements, actively maintained against mounting competition until the middle of the seventeenth century. (This carreira da Índia averaged five ships a year from 1550 to the 1630s.¹) The early shock value of their arrival and the attendant prestige may even have encouraged others for a time to associate with them, and learn from them; in the same way, Christianity proved most attractive in the first couple of generations after it was first preached in Asia, but its growth fell away once it became as well known as the Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim institutions it was bidding to replace.

然而，葡萄牙语正是从其本土基础出发，发展成为一种贸易和国际交流的工具，即通用语。当葡萄牙人在非洲和亚洲沿海的便利地区广泛定居时，他们的商业伙伴和其他合作伙伴必然会发现，他们为了与葡萄牙人建立联系而习得的语言，在与那些可能完全不懂其他语言的伙伴和合作伙伴打交道时，也具有额外的用途。事实上，葡萄牙语的这种用途在其贸易主导地位结束后至少持续了一百年，一直延续到十八世纪。当时一位法国人评论道：“与欧洲商馆进行贸易的印度教徒、摩尔人、阿拉伯人、波斯人、帕西人、犹太人和亚美尼亚人的商人，以及希望担任翻译的黑人，都必须会说这种语言；它也成为定居在印度的欧洲民族之间的一种交流媒介。” ^²

From this native basis, however, Portuguese spread as a tool of trade and international communication, i.e. as a lingua franca. When Portuguese settlements were so widespread in the accessible spots of the coasts of Africa and Asia, it was inevitable that their business partners and other associates would begin to find that the language they had acquired to facilitate relations with the Portuguese had an extra utility in dealing with others of their partners and associates—who might indeed have no other language in common. In fact, this utility of Portuguese outlived its trading dominance by at least a hundred years, lasting until the eighteenth century, when a Frenchman opined: ‘Merchants of the Hindus, Moors, Arabs, Persians, Parsees, Jews and Armenians who do business with the European factories, as well as black men who wish to work as interpreters, are obliged to speak this language; it serves also as a medium of communication among the European nations settled in India.’²

1551年，英国人托马斯·温德姆与葡萄牙同伴安东尼奥·平特亚多访问黄金海岸时，发现他们可以用葡萄牙语与贝宁国王交谈，而国王自幼便精通葡萄牙语。3 ¹⁶⁰⁰年，日本迎来了首位英国访客——飞行员威尔·亚当斯。由于接待他的将军德川家康惊讶不已，他才得以与亚当斯交流。德川家康设法找到了一位会说葡萄牙语的翻译。4 ¹⁶⁰⁶年，圣贝纳迪诺修士因缺水被迫在波斯登陆，当地军事指挥官问他：“神父，谁从印度来到这片如此遥远的土地？” ^* 1638年，另一位旅行者写道：“到访戈姆龙的游客寥寥无几，尽管他们大多是波斯人、阿拉伯人和印度人，却不会说或听不懂葡萄牙语，这是因为他们早年曾与长期占据霍尔木兹城的葡萄牙人进行贸易。” ^⁵稍晚一些，到了十七世纪中叶，锡兰国王和孟加拉湾对岸（缅甸北部）的阿拉干国王坚持使用葡萄牙语与荷兰人通信——尽管康提皇帝拉贾辛哈二世实际上与荷兰人结盟，共同对抗葡萄牙人。^†

In 1551 the Englishman Thomas Wyndham, visiting the Gold Coast with a Portuguese companion, Antonio Pinteado, found that they could converse in Portuguese with the king of Benin, who had known it since his childhood.³ In 1600, when Japan received its first ever English visitor, the pilot Will Adams, he was able to communicate only when his surprised host, the shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu, managed to find a Portuguese-speaking interpreter.⁴ In 1606 Brother Gaspar de San Bernardino, forced by lack of water to land in Persia, was amazed to be addressed by the local military commander: ‘Padre, quem te trouxe a esta terra tam longe da Índia?’^* In 1638, another traveller wrote: ‘Rare are the visitors to Gomron,t though they be for the most part Persians, Arabs and Indians, who do not speak or understand Portuguese, from the trade that they had in earlier years with the Portuguese, who long held the city of Hormuz.’⁵ A little later, in the mid-seventeenth century, kings of Ceylon, and of Arakan on the other side of the Bay of Bengal (northern Burma), insisted on using Portuguese to correspond with the Dutch—even though the emperor of Kandy, Rajasinha II, was in fact in alliance with them against the Portuguese.^†

葡萄牙语很快从一种供王子和精英旅行者使用的通用语，转变为一种更普遍被仆人阶层以及（通常是同一批人）早期基督教皈依者所理解的语言。在早期，皈依者可能只会说几句葡萄牙语。16世纪末，费尔南·门德斯·平托（Fernáo Mendes Pinto）访问中国南方一座他称之为桑皮泰（Sampitay）的城市时，遇到一位身着红色缎子长袍的女子，她慷慨激昂地控诉着远航的种种弊端，然后卷起袖子，露出手臂上优雅地烙印着的十字架。

Portuguese soon transformed itself from a lingua franca of use to princes and elite travellers to a more generally understood language of the servant class and (often the same people) early converts to Christianity. In the early days, a few phrases in Portuguese might be all that converts gained. Fernáo Mendes Pinto, on a visit to a city in southern China that he calls Sampitay in the late sixteenth century, encountered a woman dressed in red satin, who inveighed passionately against the evils of long sea voyages, and then pulled up a sleeve to reveal a cross elegantly branded on her arm.

……她大喊一声，向天堂举起双手，大声说道：Padre Nosso que estás nos Céus, santificado seja o teu nome…… [即葡萄牙语的主祷文]

… she gave a cry and lifting her hands to Heaven, said loudly: Padre Nosso que estás nos Céus, santificado seja o teu nome…[i.e. the Lord’s Prayer in Portuguese]

她用葡萄牙语说了这些话。然后，由于她只会说这些葡萄牙语，她又改用中文，纠缠着我们问我们是不是基督徒……

This she said in Portuguese. And then returning to speaking in Chinese, as she knew no more Portuguese than these words, she badgered us to tell her if we were Christians …

她接着透露，她的信仰是从父亲那里继承来的，她的父亲信奉基督教已有二十七年，皈依者超过三百人，而且每个星期天他们都会聚集在她家做礼拜^。6

She went on to reveal that she had inherited the faith from her father, who had practised it for twenty-seven years, making over three hundred converts, and that every Sunday they gathered for worship at her house.⁶

荷兰作为该地区的主要继承国，接受了当时的语言现状；1692年后，他们要求抵达马德拉斯的随军牧师在一年内学习葡萄牙语以及居住地的当地语言（通常是泰米尔语），“以便他们能够向东印度公司或其代理人的仆人或奴隶——异教徒——传授新教教义”。 ⁷ 1704年，锡兰（今斯里兰卡）的荷兰总督科尼利厄斯·扬·西蒙斯指出，在岛上任何地方都能听懂葡萄牙语；1807年，詹姆斯·科迪纳牧师在其著作《锡兰描述》中写道：“他们原始语言的一种变体至今仍在所有沿海地区使用。这种语言非常容易学习，对于没有时间学习当地人更难懂的方言的旅行者来说非常有用。” ^*

The Dutch, the principal successor power in the region, accepted the linguistic status quo; after 1692 they required arriving chaplains in Madras to learn Portuguese within a year of their arrival as well as the local language of their residence (usually Tamil) ‘in order that they may be able to instruct in Protestant religion the Pagans who are servants or slaves of the Company or its agents’.⁷ In 1704 the Dutch governor of Ceylon (now Śri Lanka), Cornelius Jan Simonsz, noted that someone speaking Portuguese could be understood anywhere on that island; and in 1807 the Reverend James Cordiner, in his A description of Ceylon, wrote that ‘A corruption of their original language is still spoken over all the sea coasts. It is very easily learned, and proves of great utility to a traveller who has not time to study the more difficult dialects of the natives.’^*

具有讽刺意味的是，葡萄牙人最坚固的堡垒之一，竟然是荷兰在爪哇岛巴达维亚的首都。让·布伦在1675年写道，为了传播福音，“他们会购买葡萄牙语圣经和各种葡萄牙语及印度语的灵修书籍，并用这些语言诵读教义问答，因为大多数印度人都能听懂这些语言……” ⁸ 1708年，当地的基督教新教牧师甚至向总督提出上诉，要求在某些教堂中坚持只使用葡萄牙语，理由是：

Ironically, one of the strongest citadels of Portuguese was the Dutch power’s own capital in Batavia on the island of Java. To preach the gospel, wrote Jean Brun in 1675, ‘they will acquire Portuguese Bibles and various devotional books in Portuguese and Indian languages and recite the catechism in these languages, because they are understood by most of the Indians… ‘⁸ In 1708 there was even an appeal by Protestant priests there to the governor-general to maintain exclusive use of Portuguese in some churches, claiming:

葡萄牙语在来自锡兰和科罗曼德尔海岸的家庭的奴隶中日常使用，所有奴隶主及其子女在与奴隶和当地基督徒的日常交往中也使用葡萄牙语；来自暹罗、马六甲、孟加拉、科罗曼德尔海岸、锡兰岛、马拉巴尔海岸、苏拉特甚至波斯的人们也使用葡萄牙语；居住在这座城市并与基督徒或其奴隶进行贸易往来的异教徒领袖也学习说葡萄牙语^。9

The Portuguese language is in everyday and familiar use by the slaves of families who come from Ceylon and the [Coromandel] Coast; by all the masters of slaves and by their children in daily dealings with the slaves and Christian natives; by the persons who come from Siam, Malacca, Bengal, Coromandel Coast, the Isle of Ceylon, the Malabar Coast, Surat and even from Persia; and the leading pagans who inhabit this city and do business with the Christians or their slaves learn to speak Portuguese.⁹

但葡萄牙语的扩张改变了它：它被广泛地皮钦语化，虽然时至今日，在这一地区的大部分地方仍然可以听到一些葡萄牙语，但在葡萄牙最大的几个长期殖民地（非洲的安哥拉和莫桑比克，以及印度的果阿）之外，葡萄牙语大多以克里奥尔语的形式存在，并深受当地竞争语言的影响。例如，在印度-葡萄牙克里奥尔语中，从古吉拉特邦的达曼和第乌到南部的斯里兰卡，在次大陆马拉巴尔海岸沿线的零星社区仍然有人使用这种语言。在这些克里奥尔语中，印度语言中不存在的双元音“ ei”被弱化为高元音“[ē]”，这与现代葡萄牙语中更接近“[ai]”的发音截然不同。^*从拉丁语继承而来的复杂词形变化已被更为简单的结构所取代：在迪乌语中，“狗”仍然是cáo，“儿子”仍然是filho，但复数形式不再是cáes和filhos，而是cáo-cáo和fi-fi；动词时态也同样是分析型的，例如eu tá vai（我要去），eu já comeu（我吃了），eu had vai（我要去），而不是标准的（不规则的）vou、comi、irei。在斯里兰卡，他们甚至吸收了当地（僧伽罗语和泰米尔语）的后置词用法：eu já vi terra por（我陆路来的）。¹⁰类似的、经过演变的葡萄牙语变体仍然在马来西亚的马六甲（当地语言被称为克里斯坦语，带有古老的宗教色彩，源自葡萄牙语cristá，意为“基督教的”）、中国南部的澳门以及东印度群岛最南端的帝汶岛使用。

But the language was changed by its expansion: it was widely pidginised, and while some Portuguese can still be heard over most of this area to this day, outside Portugal’s most substantial long-term colonies (Angola and Mozambique in Africa, Goa in India) it is in the form of creoles heavily influenced by its local competitor languages. In Indo-Portuguese creoles, for example, still spoken in scattered communities along the Malabar coast of the subcontinent from Daman and Diu in Gujarat to Śri Lanka in the south, the diphthong spelt ei, absent in Indian languages, is reduced to a high [ē] vowel, very different from modern Portuguese, where it is pronounced more like [ai].^* The complex inflexions of the language inherited from Latin have been replaced by less involved structures: in Diu, ‘dog’ may still be cáo and ‘son’ filho, but in the plural, instead of cáes and filhos, we have cáo-cáo and fi-fi; verbal tenses are likewise analytic, eu tá vai, T am going’, eu já comeu, ‘I ate’, eu had vai, ‘I shall go’, instead of the standard (and irregular) vou, comi, irei. In Śri Lanka, they have even absorbed the local (Sinhala and Tamil) use of postpositions: eu já vi terra por, ‘I came by land’.¹⁰ Similar, transformed, varieties of Portuguese are still spoken in Malacca in Malaysia (where the language is known as Kristang, betraying its old religious overtones, from Portuguese cristá, ‘Christian’), in Macao in southern China, and in Timor, on the southernmost edge of the East Indies.

第三种，也是目前最重要的葡萄牙语传播方式，是葡萄牙语被新的人群基本原封不动地吸收。这种情况在非洲殖民地安哥拉和莫桑比克都有发生，但规模很小（据最新估计 ¹¹ ，这两个国家以葡萄牙语为母语的“葡语族”人口分别为57,600人和30,000多人，分别占其总人口的0.5%和0.2%，尽管同一来源声称27%的莫桑比克人将葡萄牙语作为第二语言）。果阿也保留着少量葡萄牙语使用者。^†但葡萄牙语在曾经最大的殖民地巴西却取得了巨大的成功：巴西人口现为1.66亿，其中95%（1.58亿）以葡萄牙语为母语。这意味着巴西的葡萄牙语使用者人数是葡萄牙的16倍。

The third, and now most significant, type of spread of Portuguese occurred when it was taken up, essentially unchanged, by a new population. This has happened, but only to a tiny extent, in the African colonies of Angola and Mozambique (where recent estimates¹¹ put the native-speaking ‘Lusophone’ populations at 57,600 and above 30,000—respectively 0.5 per cent and 0.2 per cent of their populations, even if the same source claims that 27 per cent of Mozambicans know Portuguese as a second language). There is also a small remnant of Portuguese in Goa.^† But it has happened triumphantly in what was Portugal’s largest colony, Brazil: the population is now 166 million, and 95 per cent of them, 158 million, have Portuguese as their first language. This means that speakers in Brazil now outnumber those in Portugal sixteen to one.

美洲的葡萄牙语

Portuguese in America

那么，为什么葡萄牙语在巴西传播得如此成功，而在其他地方却未能如此呢？原因当然是历史性的，但也与政治，尤其是经济因素有关。简而言之，在葡萄牙的殖民地中，巴西是唯一一个既拥有吸引移民的巨额财富，又没有强大到足以抵抗其统治的国家。

How, then, has the language come to be transplanted into Brazil so effectively, but nowhere else? The reasons are, of course, historical, but also political and above all economic. In brief, Brazil was the only one of its colonies where Portugal found both a significant source of wealth which was attractive to immigrants, and no pre-existing power strong enough to resist its domination.

印度无疑是财富的源泉，贸易商品种类繁多；但葡萄牙人在那里遇到的地方势力有效地阻止了他们从沿海定居点向外扩张。在斯里兰卡（葡萄牙人称之为塞劳），葡萄牙人一度拥有有效的控制权，如果不是很快被荷兰人驱逐，他们很可能在那里长期立足，甚至发展出自己的语言。更往东，在东印度群岛，葡萄牙人试图从香料贸易中获利；但这些商品的市场很快就崩溃了。无论如何，从其他欧洲帝国在亚洲的命运来看，从与这些国家的贸易中获得的财富永远无法吸引大量移民，从而建立一个庞大的葡萄牙语社群，这一点是可以论证的。贸易需要资本，或者至少需要强大的军事力量来强加条件；因此，政府和大型组织拥有压倒性的优势。如果财富的来源是贸易而不是生产，那么大量移民和小规模外来者要想参与其中，唯一的办法就是成为海盗。

India was certainly a source of wealth, from trade in a vast range of commodities; but the local powers that the Portuguese encountered there effectively resisted any Portuguese break-out from their coastal settlements. In Sri Lanka, known to them as Ceiláo, the Portuguese at one time had effective control, and might well have established themselves, and perhaps their language, in the long term if they had not soon been expelled by the Dutch. Farther east, in the islands of the East Indies, the Portuguese looked for profit from the trade in spices; but the bottom fell out of the market for these commodities too soon. It is in any case arguable—not least from comparing the fate of other European empires in Asia—that the kind of wealth derivable from trade with these countries was never going to attract large numbers of immigrants, and so build a large Portuguese-language community. Trade requires capital, or at least a significant military force to impose terms; as a result, governments and large-scale organisations have an overwhelming advantage. Where trade, rather than production, is the source of wealth, the only way for large numbers of immigrants and small-scale outsiders to take part is if they become pirates.

在非洲，尽管葡萄牙自十五世纪以来就在西海岸沿线建立了一些小型定居点，主要作为印度航线的中转港，但除了奴隶贸易之外，从未发现其他重要的财富来源。这些定居点也从未吸引到大量讲葡萄牙语的移民。然而，奴隶贸易间接地极大地促进了葡萄牙语在南美洲的传播。在1526年至1870年间被运往美洲的1000万非洲奴隶中，仅巴西就有360万，^最初是为甘蔗种植园提供劳动力，后来则用于棉花和烟草种植。与美洲其他奴隶制经济体一样，这些非洲人无法将自己的语言带到美洲。他们与昔日邻居的联系太少，以至于无法使用自己的语言，因为奴隶市场不分原籍地将他们贩卖到各个殖民地，他们不得不学习新主人的语言。而且，这些主人往往还会成为他们孩子的父亲。短短几代人的时间，大部分人口就变成了混血儿，但仍然只会说葡萄牙语。

In Africa, although Portugal had held small settlements all down the western coast since the fifteenth century, principally as staging ports for the carreira da Índia, no serious source of wealth besides the slave trade was ever discovered. They never attracted large numbers of Portuguese-speaking settlers. But this trade contributed mightily, at one remove, to the spread of Portuguese in South America. Of the 10 million African slaves shipped to the Americas between 1526 and 1870, 3.6 million went to Brazil alone,¹² at first to provide labour for sugar plantations, later for cotton and tobacco. As in the other slave economies of the Americas, the Africans could not bring their languages with them. They were in contact with too few of their ex-neighbours to speak those languages, for the slave markets distributed them without regard to origin all over the colonies, and they had perforce to learn the language of their new masters. Often too those very masters would become the fathers of their children; in a very few generations most of the population came to be of mixed blood, but nonetheless speakers just of Portuguese.

白人移民涌入巴西的规模也远超葡萄牙其他殖民地。早期，葡萄牙宫廷和民众对这片美洲殖民地兴趣寥寥，因为不知何故，它并未像西班牙在墨西哥和秘鲁的殖民地那样，带来大量的金银财富。

White immigration too was more substantial into Brazil than to anywhere else in the Portuguese possessions. Early on, neither Portugal’s court nor its people had taken much interest in their American colony, since it had unaccountably not yielded anything like the copious gold and silver that the Spanish were extracting from their colonies in Mexico and Peru.

但其他欧洲列强的敌意以及抵御这些敌意所需的努力，反而更加坚定了葡萄牙人守护这片土地的决心。西班牙根据1494年的《托尔德西拉斯条约》尊重了葡萄牙的领土主张——事实上，从1580年到1640年，西班牙和葡萄牙曾处于同一（西班牙）政府的统治之下——但其他非条约缔约国的威胁则更为严重。法国于1555年率先发起挑战，其劫掠和试图建立殖民地的行动一直持续到1615年；随后，英国（程度较轻）从1582年到1595年也对葡萄牙构成威胁。而最具侵略性的当属荷兰。在1598-1599年间发动了一些无关紧要的早期袭击之后，从17世纪20年代到1641年，他们成功占领了从圣路易斯到阿拉卡茹的整个巴西东北部地区，并一直统治到1654年。1624年，他们甚至短暂地占领了葡萄牙殖民地的核心地带——其位于巴亚（也称萨尔瓦多）的首府。葡萄牙人似乎只有在最终接受失去其在印度及其他地区大部分殖民地的现实之后，才有了夺回这些地区的决心，也因此有了夺回这些地区的资源。（事实上，正如我们很快就会看到的，这些殖民地后来成为了荷兰人的下一个目标。）

But the hostile attentions of other European powers, and the effort needed to repel them, then concentrated Portugal’s sense that here was something worth having. The Spanish had respected the claims in accord with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas—indeed, from 1580 to 1640 Spain and Portugal were united under a single (Spanish) government—but other powers that were not party to it had been more dangerous. The French had posed the first challenge in 1555, with raids and attempted settlements that persisted until 1615, then the English (less seriously) from 1582 to 1595. Most aggressive were the Dutch. After some early inconsequential attacks in 1598-9, from the 1620s until 1641 they succeeded in taking possession of the whole of the Brazilian north-east from Sáo Luis to Aracaju, and holding it until 1654. In 1624 they had even briefly taken the very heart of the Portuguese colony, its first capital at Baía (also called Salvador). The Portuguese seem to have found the determination, and hence the resources, to retake them only when they resigned themselves finally to the loss of most of their colonies in India and beyond. (Indeed, as we shall soon see, those became the next target of the Dutch.)

到十七世纪中叶，一系列果断的探险队已经绘制出了内陆大部分地区的地图。这些探险队被称为“旗帜”（ bandeiras），其出发点是（大多徒劳无功地）寻找黄金、白银、珠宝或俘虏土著居民为奴隶。他们的主要成就在于提前划定了与西班牙殖民地的边界，而当时从大陆另一侧对这些殖民地的探索相对较少。（这些边界实际上是在一百年后，即1750年的《马德里条约》、1761年的《帕尔多条约》和1777年的《伊尔德丰索条约》中最终确定的，这些条约最终废除了名义上的托尔德西利亚斯线。）

A series of resolute expeditions had mapped out most of the interior by the mid-seventeenth century. Known as bandeiras, ‘flags’, they were inspired by the (mostly unavailing) quest for gold, silver, jewels or natives to capture as slaves. Their main success had lain in pre-emptively defining borders with Spain’s colonies that were being rather less actively explored from the opposite side of the continent. (The borders were actually agreed a hundred years later in the Treaties of Madrid, 1750, Pardo, 1761 and Ildefonso, 1777, which finally erased the notional Line of Tordesillas.)

尽管进行了这些探索，但在十七世纪下半叶之前，唯一在距离海岸400公里以外定居的葡萄牙人只有传教士，尤其是耶稣会士。和在西班牙殖民地一样，他们发现用非母语传教更容易。他们称大多数当地语言为“跛脚的舌头” （línguas travadas），显然对这些语言缺乏热情。在1657年为即将出发的传教团所作的著名布道中，安东尼奥·维埃拉神父说，他曾听人把亚马逊河称为“巴别河”，因为那里有八十种语言：“学习恩盖巴语、朱鲁纳语、塔帕若语、特雷梅姆贝语或马马亚纳语该是多么困难啊，这些语言的名字本身就令人恐惧……上帝赐予使徒们火焰般的舌头，却赐予他们的继承者们舌头的火焰。”火焰般的舌头停止了，但舌头的火焰却没有停止，因为这火焰，这灵性，这爱上帝，使人学习、研究并掌握这些语言^。13

Despite these explorations, until the second half of the seventeenth century the only Portuguese to settle more than 400 kilometres from the coast had been the missionaries, especially the Jesuits. And as in the Spanish colonies, they had found it easier to preach in a language other than their own. Most of the local languages they called línguas travadas, ‘hobbled tongues’, so there was evidently little enthusiasm for them. In a celebrated sermon preached to a departing mission in 1657, Father Antonio Vieira said he had heard someone call the Amazon the ’rio Babel’, for its eighty languages: ‘What must it be to learn Nheengaíba, or Juruna, or Tapajó, or Teremembé, or Mamaianá, whose very names seem to strike terror?… To the Apostles God gave tongues of fire, but to their successors a fire of tongues. The tongues of fire came to an end, but the fire of tongues did not, because this fire, this spirit, this love of God makes one learn, study and know those languages.’¹³

尽管语言学习与对上帝的爱（或敬畏）有着如此令人兴奋的结合，但在巴西，图皮南巴语（一种与巴拉圭瓜拉尼语非常接近的语言）却被证明可以在任何地方使用（参见第十章“过去的斗争：美洲语言的传播”，第348页），并最终被称为通用语（葡萄牙语中相当于西班牙语的通用语）。在殖民地早期，它是与当地土著居民沟通的主要工具。一位耶稣会士在1560年左右写道：“几乎所有来到王国定居并与印第安人交流的人都会在短时间内学会这种语言，而出生在这里的葡萄牙人的子女，尤其是圣维森特总督辖区内的居民，对这种语言的了解甚至超过了葡萄牙人。” ¹⁴

For all this heady combination of language-learning and the love (or fear) of God, in Brazil it had turned out that Tupinambá (a language very closely related to the Guaraní of Paraguay) could be used everywhere (see Chapter 10, ‘Past struggles: How American languages had spread’, p. 348), and it came to be called the língua geral (the Portuguese equivalent of the Spanish lengua general). In the early days of the colony, it was the main means of communication with the natives. One Jesuit witness wrote, about 1560: ‘Almost all who come to the Kingdom and are settled and in communication with the Indians get to know it within a short time, and the sons and daughters of the Portuguese born here get to know it better than the Portuguese do, mainly in the captaincy of Sao Vicente.’¹⁴

耶稣会士将印第安人组织成村落（aldeias）和保留地（ reducáes），实际上抵制了其他白人定居者的入侵。这种对内陆地区殖民开发的抵制一直持续到十八世纪中叶。其结果是，在殖民地存在的最初两个世纪里，葡萄牙语的使用仅限于沿海地区。直到1759年，耶稣会士才失去了以这种方式保护和组织印第安人的权力，他们被剥夺了权力并被驱逐出境。^*此外，葡萄牙语的进一步使用也在同一时间被禁止。

Organising the Indians into aldeias (villages) and reduçáes (reserved areas), the Jesuits in fact resisted the inroads of other white settlers. This kind of resistance to a specifically colonial development of the interior was to last until the mid-eighteenth century. One effect was that the use of Portuguese remained confined to the coastal districts for the first two centuries of the colony’s existence. Only in 1759 did the Jesuits lose their power to protect and organise the Indians in this way, when they were stripped of their powers and expelled from the country.^* For good measure, the further use of the língua geral was banned at the same time.

但巴西对移民而言，此时的吸引力与日俱增。1654年葡萄牙重新夺回霸权后，一系列经济发展最终促成了欧洲大规模移民，葡萄牙语也随之传播开来。17世纪末18世纪初，人们在巴西南部中部地区（此后被称为米纳斯吉拉斯州，意为“综合矿区”）发现了蕴藏着黄金、祖母绿、钻石和其他宝石的矿藏，内陆的巴亚、戈亚斯和马托格罗索州也有矿藏。由此引发了世界上第一次淘金热，淘金者主要来自葡萄牙。此后，18世纪巴西的经济以黄金为主要收入来源，政府财政收入也因此稳固。到了18世纪末，黄金资源枯竭，取而代之的是畜牧业的出口利润，尤其是皮革销售。皮革产业的发展得益于南部和中部地区大片草原的开发。

But Brazil was now to become a more appealing prospect for settlers. After the reassertion of Portuguese power in 1654, a stream of economic developments at last provided a motive for large-scale immigration from Europe, and with it the spread of the Portuguese language. Ore beds with gold, emeralds, diamonds and other precious stones were found in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, principally in the southern central area henceforth called Minas Gerais, ‘General Mines’, but also inland in Baía, Goiás and Mato Grosso. The result was the world’s first gold rush, coming mostly from Portugal, and thereafter an eighteenth-century economy with government revenues founded securely on gold. When the gold ran out towards the end of that century, its place was taken by the export profits from cattle ranching, especially in sales of leather, an industry that had taken advantage of the opening up of massive grasslands in these same south and central areas.

其结果是巴西的葡萄牙语人口出现了大规模且持续的增长，这既源于移民（包括奴隶进口），也源于自然增长。1650年左右，巴西的葡萄牙语人口不足15万；到1770年，这一数字已超过150万；而同期，美洲其他地区（包括西班牙语和英语国家）的葡萄牙语人口也仅增长了近一倍。在同一时期，巴西拥有了世界上人口第二和第三多的葡萄牙语城市——巴亚（萨尔瓦多）和里约热内卢，仅次于里斯本。这些来自欧洲的富裕且多产的移民，加上来自非洲的流离失所的奴隶的涌入，使得内陆地区原有的通用语图皮南巴语逐渐被边缘化，更不用说各个部落使用的其他小语种了。据1985年的估计，巴西使用土著语言的人口不超过15.5万人，大约每1000名葡萄牙语使用者中就有1名使用土著语言。 ¹⁵

The result was a massive, and subsequently sustained, increase in Brazil’s Portuguese-speaking population, both from immigration (including import of slaves), and from natural growth. This had comprised less than 150,000 around 1650; by 1770 they comprised over 1,500,000; and this in a period when the rest of the Americas (Spanish- and English-speaking alike) had just about doubled their numbers. In the same period, Brazil had come to provide the second and third most populous Portuguese-speaking cities in the world, Baía (Salvador) and Rio de Janeiro yielding only to Lisbon. This influx of rich and prolific immigrants from Europe, which reinforced the influx of uprooted slaves from Africa, crowded out the previous língua geral of the interior, Tupinambá, to say nothing of the tiny languages spoken by individual tribes. It was estimated in 1985 that there were no more than 155,000 Brazilians who spoke indigenous languages, approximately one for every thousand speakers of Portuguese.¹⁵

归根结底，葡萄牙语发展到如今的地位（1.76亿母语使用者，世界排名第七，超过德语、法语和日语），几乎完全归功于巴西过去三百年的经济发展和随之而来的人口增长，而很少归功于它作为殖民行政语言或亚洲通用语从葡萄牙传播开来，而这两种情况都在四百多年前达到了顶峰。

Ultimately, then, the growth of Portuguese to its present status (176 million native speakers, ranking seventh in the world, ahead of German, French and Japanese) owes almost everything to the economic development, and consequent population growth, of Brazil over the past three hundred years, and very little to its spread from Portugal as a language for colonial administration, or as a lingua franca in Asia, both of which peaked over four hundred years ago.

荷兰入侵者

Dutch interlopers

Saïdjah kwam te 巴达维亚 aan。如果您在其中，您将看到 Saïdjah 的行为。想要巴达维亚的男人们在安拉金瓦伦遇到欧洲人的骚扰。 Saïdjah leerde spoedigmaleisch，maar Paste Braaf op…

Saïdjah kwam te Batavia aan. Hy verzocht een heer hem in deenst te nemen, hetgeen die heer terstond deed omdat hy Saïdjah niet verstond. Want te Batavia heeft men gaarne bedienden die nog geen maleisch spreken en dus nog niet zo bedorven zyn als anderen die langer in aanraaking waren met europese beschaving. Saïdjah leerde spoedig maleisch, maar paste braaf op…

赛贾来到巴达维亚。他请求一位绅士收留他，这位绅士立刻答应了，因为他听不懂赛贾的语言。在巴达维亚，人们喜欢那些还不会说马来语的仆人，这样他们就不会像那些长期接触欧洲文明的人那样被宠坏。赛贾很快就学会了马来语，而且举止得体……

Saïdjah came to Batavia. He asked a gentleman to take him into service, which the gentleman at once did, because he did not understand Saïdjah[’s language]. For in Batavia people liked servants who did not yet speak Malay and so were not so spoiled as the others who had been longer in contact with European civilization. Saïdjah learnt Malay quickly, but behaved well…

Multatuli，Max Havelaar（阿姆斯特丹，1860 年），第 1 章。 17 号

Multatuli, Max Havelaar (Amsterdam, 1860), ch. 17

Pelabur habis 巨港 tak alah

Pelabur habis Palembang tak alah

口粮用完了，巨港没有被打败。

Rations finished, Palembang not beaten

马来谚语^*

Malay proverb^*

从十六世纪中叶到十七世纪中叶，葡萄牙在亚洲的贸易帝国经历了长达一个世纪的稳定期后，几乎是迅速地衰落了。这主要归咎于另一个欧洲小国——荷兰的努力。^*荷兰人迅速剥夺了葡萄牙在亚洲的收入来源，并在东印度群岛占据了长达三个世纪的统治地位。但在世界语言史上，荷兰人却只扮演了负面的角色。荷兰的崛起表明，一个成功的欧洲帝国最终可能在其领土内几乎不留下任何语言痕迹——这实际上进一步证明了内布里哈的观点是错误的。

After a century of stability, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth, the Portuguese trading empire in Asia was lost almost as rapidly as it was built up. This was overwhelmingly due to the efforts of another small European power, the Dutch.^* The Dutch speedily divested Portugal of the sources of its Asian incomes, and became a fixture in the East Indies for three centuries. But in our history of world languages, they have only a negative part to play. The Dutch career demonstrates that a successful European imperial power may yet leave little or no linguistic trace in its domains—further evidence, in fact, that Nebrija was wrong.

荷兰的帝国生涯起步艰难，最初几乎只是他们反抗西班牙独立战争中的一个商业副业。这场战争断断续续地持续了1568年至1648年，但实际上，从1588年起，这场战争赋予了新成立的荷兰联合省共和国的市民相当大的行动自由。尽管时局动荡，但到16世纪90年代，向北欧供应奢侈品（主要来自亚洲，通常经由葡萄牙转口）已成为荷兰商人名副其实的“暴利生意”。然而，1598年，西班牙/葡萄牙帝国禁止荷兰船只、货物和商人进入其所有港口。荷兰人因此集中精力，其直接结果是东印度贸易蓬勃发展——到1601年，已有14支荷兰舰队，65艘船只，代表8家不同的公司扬帆起航。¹⁶如此激烈的竞争必然会对印度本土和欧洲的客户市场都造成不利影响，因此在1602年，在所有相关公司的串通下，联合东印度公司（Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie，简称VOC）成立，成为此类贸易的国家垄断企业。稍晚一些，在1624年，为了控制荷兰在西半球的利益，又成立了类似的机构——西印度公司（Westindische Compagnie，简称WIC）。

The Dutch imperial career began against the odds, almost as a commercial sideline in their war of independence from Spain, a struggle that was to last intermittently from 1568 to 1648, but which in fact, from 1588, allowed the burghers of the new republic of the United Provinces considerable freedom of action. Despite the uncertain times, the supply of luxury goods to northern Europe (mostly from Asia, and often by re-export from Portugal) had become proverbially ‘rich trades’ for Dutch merchants in the 1590s. Then in 1598 Dutch ships, goods and merchants were embargoed from all ports in the Spanish/Portuguese empire. Minds were duly concentrated, and the immediate result was an explosion of East India trading enterprise—by 1601 fourteen Dutch fleets, with sixty-five vessels, had set sail on behalf of eight different companies.¹⁶ Such a splurge of competition could only be adverse both at source in the Indies and in the customer markets of Europe, and so in 1602, with the collusion of all the companies involved, the United East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—VOC) was founded as a state monopoly of such trade. Somewhat later, in 1624, a similar organisation, the West India Company (Westindische Compagnie–-WIC) was established to control Dutch interests in the western hemisphere.

两家公司中，西印度公司（WIC）在获取荷兰地产和殖民地人口方面远不如另一家成功。它起步不错；从1623年起，北美的一片区域（涵盖如今新泽西州、特拉华州和宾夕法尼亚州的大部分地区，以及纽约州南部）被划为“新尼德兰”（Nieuw Nederland），随后又从葡萄牙手中夺取了其他地区：1637年至1642年间征服几内亚海岸，1631年征服巴西北部（命名为“新荷兰”），1641年征服安哥拉，并在安的列斯群岛和圭亚那群岛获得了一些不太重要的领地。大约在1640年，西印度公司控制了大西洋沿岸的糖、奴隶和毛皮市场。但到1665年，除了安的列斯群岛和圭亚那群岛之外，其他地区几乎全部失去。除了葡萄牙的收复之外，新尼德兰于1664年被英国武力夺取（新阿姆斯特丹后来成为纽约）。西印度公司退居二线，成为一家普通的贸易公司，在它曾经渴望统治的地区过着优渥的生活。几内亚仍然蕴藏着丰富的黄金，荷兰对非洲奴隶的需求也依然旺盛。在一些小型殖民地，荷兰语仍然是行政语言。如今，苏里南共和国（荷属圭亚那）仅有不到一千名荷兰语母语者，而该国五十万人口中，或许有四分之一的人以荷兰语为第二语言。安的列斯群岛在很大程度上仍然依赖荷兰，但其18.5万人口中，以荷兰语为母语的人不到10%。

Of the two companies, WIC had far less long-term success as a procurer of Dutch real estate and colonial populations. It began well; from 1623 a tract of North America (covering most of what is now New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, and the southern half of New York State) was taken as ‘Nieuw Nederland’, and outright conquests from Portugal followed, of the Guinea coast in 1637-42, of northern Brazil (as ‘Nieuw Holland’) in 1631, of Angola in 1641, as well as the acquisition of less crucial holdings in the Antilles and Guyanas. Around 1640, WIC was in control of the Atlantic markets in sugar, slavery and furs. But by 1665 all but the Antilles and Guyanas had been lost. Besides the recaptures by Portugal, Nieuw Nederland was taken forcibly by England (and New Amsterdam became New York) in 1664. WIC retrenched to being a simple trading company, making a good living where previously it had aspired to rule. There was still plenty of gold in Guinea, and a demand for African slaves in the Netherlands. Dutch remained, in the small colonies, as a language of administration. Nowadays there are a bare thousand native speakers of Dutch in the republic of Suriname (Dutch Guiana), while perhaps a quarter of the half-million population use it as a second language. The Antilles remain for the most part dependent on the Netherlands, but fewer than 10 per cent of the 185,000 people have Dutch as a first language.

另一方面，荷兰东印度公司（VOC）则走向了真正的殖民辉煌。在香料贸易的源头——东印度群岛，他们永久性地将葡萄牙人从安汶驱逐出去，随后又在摩鹿加群岛的特尔纳特和蒂多雷（1605-1662年）、马来亚的马六甲（1641年）以及苏拉威西岛的马卡萨（今乌戎班当，1667年）也相继夺取。他们甚至超越了葡萄牙的领土范围，于1619年占领了西爪哇的雅加达，并将其作为行动中心（相当于葡萄牙的果阿），更名为巴达维亚。^*他们没有诉诸战争，而是通过阴谋诡计，于1639年取代葡萄牙人成为日本贸易的垄断者，并在长崎建立了永久基地。^†在印度次大陆，他们于1613年在普利卡特（Pulicat）建立了早期据点，并在1638年至1661年间从葡萄牙人手中夺取了锡兰（Ceylon）及其在南印度从坎努尔（Kannur）到尼加拉瓜（Negapatam）的整个殖民地。在非洲，他们未能长期将葡萄牙人从安哥拉或莫桑比克驱逐出去，但随后于1652年在开普敦（Kaapstad）建立了他们自己的南非殖民地。威廉·博斯曼（Willem Bosman）在1704年评论说，葡萄牙人“就像猎犬一样伺机而动，猎物刚一落定，就被其他人抢走了”。 ¹⁷

The VOC, on the other hand, went on to real colonial greatness. In the East Indies, the source of the spice trade, they displaced the Portuguese permanently from Ambon, and later Ternate and Tidore, in the Moluccas (1605-62), Malacca in Malaya (1641), and Macassar (modern Ujung Pandang) in Sulawesi (1667). They also went beyond the scope of Portugal’s holdings by seizing Jakarta in western Java (1619) as their centre of operations (comparable to Goa for the Portuguese), and renaming it Batavia.^* Through intrigue rather than war, they displaced the Portuguese as monopolists in the Japan trade (1639), with a permanent base in Nagasaki.^† In the Indian subcontinent, they established an early foothold at Pulicat (1613), and between 1638 and 1661 they took from the Portuguese Ceylon and their whole string of southern Indian possessions from Kannur round to Negapatam. In Africa, they were unable for long to dislodge the Portuguese from Angola or Mozambique, but went on to found their own South African colony in between at Cape Town (Kaapstad) in 1652. Willem Bosman remarked in 1704 that the Portuguese had been ‘as setting-dogs to spring the game, which as soon as they had done, was seized by others’.¹⁷

令人好奇却又意义重大的是，他们的殖民侵略行为只有在非洲才产生了语言上的影响。荷兰殖民者被吸引到这里，正如巴西最终吸引了葡萄牙殖民者一样。这些荷兰殖民者并非商人或矿工，而是农民（即荷兰语中的“布尔人”）。他们的语言是荷兰语的一种简化版本，后来被称为南非荷兰语（意为“非洲语”），随着人口的增长而发展壮大，即使在英国控制南非之后也是如此。^*随后，在1836年，厌倦了英国统治的他们开始了“大迁徙”，向如今南非东部地区迁徙，建立了奥兰治自由邦和德兰士瓦。在1899年至1902年的布尔战争中被英国击败后，他们的影响力暂时减弱。但随着人口数量的增长——就像后来黑人和白人之间的人口增长一样——在接下来的半个世纪里，南非荷兰语逐渐成为南非统治阶级的官方语言。 1991年，南非有620万南非荷兰语使用者，主要集中在比勒陀利亚和布隆方丹，其中100万人是母语为南非荷兰语的双语者，英语也是他们的母语。另有400万人将其作为第二或第三语言使用。加起来，掌握南非荷兰语的人数约为1000万，与目前全球约2000万荷兰语使用者（荷兰1340万，比利时500万）相比，人数相当可观。 ¹⁸

Curiously but significantly, it was only in Africa that their colonial intrusiveness bore any linguistic fruit. It was here that Dutch settlers were attracted, just as Brazil, in the end, attracted settlers from Portugal. The Dutch settlers were not merchants, nor miners, but farmers (i.e., in Dutch, Boer). Their language, a mildly simplified version of Dutch that came to be known as Afrikaans (’African’), developed and grew with their population, even after the British had gained control of the country.^* Subsequently, in 1836, tiring of British rule, they spread out on the Great Trek, into the east of what is now South Africa, to found the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Their influence was reduced temporarily after their defeat by the British in the Boer War of 1899-1902. But numbers prevailed in the white community—as they were later to do as between black and white—and in the following half-century Afrikaans came to be explicitly the language of the South African ruling majority. Afrikaans in 1991 had 6.2 million speakers in South Africa, centred in Pretoria and Bloemfontein, a million of them native bilinguals with English. Another 4 million there were using it as a second or third language. Taking all of them together, the 10 million who know the language compare significantly with the 20 million or so who now speak Dutch worldwide (13.4 million in the Netherlands, another 5 million in Belgium).¹⁸

在更东边的地区，荷兰的统治持续时间较短。锡兰和南印度，如同开普殖民地一样，在十八世纪之交，由于欧洲政治格局的变迁，落入了英国之手。荷兰长达一个半世纪的影响力就此终结，如今已难以辨认。尽管在东印度群岛也曾出现过类似的权力更迭——期间，年仅三十岁的斯坦福·莱佛士曾担任爪哇岛副总督五年，并偶然发现了失落的佛教圣城婆罗浮屠——但最终，英国人只满足于控制马来半岛和婆罗洲北部沿海地区。荷兰对这些岛屿的控制最终得以维持；事实上，这种控制一直持续到第二次世界大战，距离他们最初从葡萄牙人手中夺取这些岛屿足足有三百年之久。

Farther east, Dutch presence proved shorter lasting. Ceylon and southern India, like the Cape colony, passed into British hands at the turn of the eighteenth century as a side effect of political changes in Europe. The century and a half of Dutch influence that was then brought to an end is hard now to discern. But although there was some similar back-and-forth in the East Indies—during which a thirty-year-old Stamford Raffles became for five years lieutenant-governor of Java, and chanced on the lost Buddhist wonder city of Borobodur—it ended with the British contenting themselves with the Malay peninsula and the northern coast of Borneo. Dutch control of the islands was ultimately maintained; in fact it lasted until the Second World War, a full three hundred years from their original dispossession of the Portuguese.

那么，为什么荷兰语如今不是荷属东印度群岛继承国印度尼西亚的官方语言，或者至少不是通用语呢？考虑到荷兰语也属于日耳曼语系，人们几乎会联想到所谓的“日耳曼语诅咒”。要知道，尽管法兰克人、汪达尔人和哥特人在公元五世纪征服了西欧和北非，但作为当时伟大的征服者，他们却从未将自己的语言传播到其领土之内。而到了十七至二十世纪的近代，他们的后裔荷兰人也同样无力为自己的语言赢得新的使用者。与此同时，英国人在马来亚传播英语，葡萄牙人在帝汶岛的飞地坚持使用，西班牙人试图在菲律宾推广卡斯蒂利亚语，法国人甚至试图将印度支那打造成法语区的据点。

Why, then, is Dutch not now the official government language, or at least a lingua franca, in the state of Indonesia, the successor of the Dutch East Indies? Given that Dutch is another Germanic language, one is almost tempted to detect a ‘curse of Germanic’. Remember that despite their awesome conquests in western Europe and North Africa in the fifth century AD, the Franks, Vandals and Goths, alone among the great conquerors of the era, had never spread their language across their domains. And now, in the modern age from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, their descendants the Dutch were no more capable of winning new speakers for their language, when around them the British were spreading English in Malaya, Portuguese was persisting in its enclave on Timor, the Spanish were trying to bring up the Philippines in Castilian, and indeed the French were attempting to seed Indo-China as an outpost of francophony.

荷兰语在东印度群岛的奇特缺席，其根本原因在于当地荷兰语使用者的实用主义。^*毕竟，他们到那里有两个目的：首要目的是赚钱，其次——而且是次要的——是传播他们所钟爱的加尔文主义形式的基督教新教。最终，这两个目的都促使他们使用一种外来语，而不是他们的母语。首先，就贸易而言，显然需要使用任何可用的语言；而事实证明，东印度群岛的贸易社群已经使用一种语言至少两个世纪，甚至可能更久。

The fundamental reason for the curious absence of the Dutch language is the pragmatism of its speakers in the Indies.^* They were there, after all, with two motives: primarily to make money, and secondarily—a long way second—to spead Protestant Christianity in their own dear Calvinist form. In the event, both motives called for the use of a foreign contact language, rather than their own mother tongue. For trade, in the first instance, there was evidently a need to use whatever language came to hand; and it turned out that there was already a language that the trading community of the East Indies had had in common for at least two centuries, and perhaps much longer.

这就是马来语，Bahasa Mclayu（或荷兰语拼写为Bahasa Melajoe），最广为人知的是它在马六甲贸易中心进行交易的商人的行话。马六甲建于十五世纪初，但凭借其在海峡的制高点以及对中国皇帝的扶持，发展迅速。这种语言的传播很可能始于更早时期。马六甲是由一位来自室利佛逝（Śrī Vijaya）的桀骜不驯的王子建立的，室利佛逝在公元七至十三世纪期间发展了广泛的贸易。其主要城市之一占碑也曾被称为马来语（Malāyu）。无论马来语的起源如何，掌握了这种语言，荷兰商人就可以在整个印度群岛开展业务，^*这无疑是一项额外的优势，因为荷兰东印度公司（VOC）一直对整个地区的贸易感兴趣，而不仅仅是从荷兰的供应地向外出口^。19

This was Malay, Bahasa Mclayu (or in Dutch spelling Bahasa Melajoe), best known as the jargon of merchants having dealings at the entrepôt of Malacca. Malacca had been founded only at the beginning of the fifteenth century, but had grown very fast, through exploitation of its commanding position on the strait, and cultivation of the Chinese emperor. It is likely that the spread of the language had started earlier than this. Malacca had been founded by a wayward prince from Śrī Vijaya, a state that had cultivated wide trading interests from the seventh to thirteenth centuries AD. And Jambi, one of its principal cities, had also been called Malāyu. Whatever Malay’s origins, with this one language in hand a Dutch merchant could do business all over the Indies,^* an added advantage since the VOC was always interested in trade all over the area, not just simple exports from the sources of supply to the Netherlands.¹⁹

同样，为了传播荷兰归正教会的信仰和实践，如果不局限于那些已经懂荷兰语或愿意学习荷兰语的人，那么发展信徒就更容易、更快捷。早期，人们曾尝试在安汶建立荷兰语学校，1627年时多达16所。但事实上，学习荷兰语的孩子毕业后几乎没有机会使用这门语言，因此他们往往会忘记。20这或许是语言学习初期的一个普遍现象，因为他们还没有时间晋升到更高的层次，所以主要面对的是不懂这种语言的成年人。但荷兰的务实主义者不愿等待，于是终止了这项实验。马来语也与归正宗教联系在一起，被指定为“共同的本土教会”的^语言 ^。21

Likewise, in order to spread the faith and practice of the Dutch Reformed Church, it was easier, and quicker, to make converts when one was not restricted to those who already knew Dutch, or who might be willing to learn it. Early on, there had been an attempt to establish schools at Ambon in Dutch, with as many as sixteen of them running in 1627. But there were in fact few opportunities for children who learnt the language to use it after they graduated, and so they tended to forget it.²⁰ Probably this is a common feature of the early years of a language cohort, when they have not yet had time to be promoted up the system, and so are mostly dealing with adults who do not share the language. But the Dutch pragmatists were not prepared to wait, and the experiment was terminated. Malay became identified with Reformed religion too, designated as the language for ‘a common indigenous Church’.²¹

我们不妨简要探究一下，为什么荷兰人的实用主义没有延伸到在其领土内使用另一种早已存在的通用语——葡萄牙语。我们已经注意到，他们在锡兰（今斯里兰卡）的事务中必须使用葡萄牙语，而且葡萄牙语实际上已经不知不觉地传播到了他们在巴达维亚的行动中心。当然，一些荷兰牧师，特别是17世纪80年代的弗朗索瓦·瓦伦丁，在教会工作中倾向于使用葡萄牙语而非马来语。^值得注意的是，皈依天主教的人数并不多，而且大多来自那些先前已被葡萄牙人皈依天主教的教众；印度教徒、佛教徒和穆斯林则对新的信仰几乎无动于衷。但是，葡萄牙语与天主教之间的联系在荷兰加尔文教徒心中依然根深蒂固。在商业领域，也必然残留着一丝自豪感，他们不愿在自己的组织机制中容许战败敌人的语言——事实上，直到 1640 年西班牙和葡萄牙（他们怨恨的统治者）分离为止。

We might briefly query why the Dutch pragmatism did not extend to making use of another pre-existing lingua franca in their domains, namely Portuguese, which we have already noted they were required to use in dealings in Ceylon, and had indeed spread, willy-nilly, into their own centre of operations at Batavia. Certainly, some Dutch pastors, notably François Valentijn in the 1680s, were inclined to favour it over Malay in the work of the Church.²² It is notable that conversions, never very many, were found mostly in congregations that had previously been converted to Catholicism by the Portuguese; the Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims turned out to be largely impervious to the new creed. But the association between Portuguese and Catholicism remained strong in Dutch Calvinist hearts; and in business, there must also have been a residue of pride, resisting any place for the language of their defeated enemies—indeed, until 1640 and the separation of Spain and Portugal, their resented overlords—in the mechanism of their own organisation.

于是，马来语成为了荷属东印度群岛的官方语言。最初，这只是一个权宜之计，但到了十八世纪，它已成为官方政策的一部分。^* 1731年至1733年间，梅尔基奥·莱德克尔和格奥尔格·亨里克·韦恩德利翻译了马来语版的《圣经》，后者还在1736年出版了一部马来语语法书。尽管当时有人尝试用马来语进行布道，但马来语的普及程度并不高。马来语主要成为行政官员、经理、商人和统治者之间的沟通工具，并一直沿用至今。鉴于荷兰帝国行政管理高度分散，很大程度上保留了当地酋长国的权力，并通过这些酋长国进行沟通，这种模式起初运作良好。

And so Malay became the language of the Dutch Indies, first as a practical short-term measure, but by the eighteenth century by official policy.^* In 1731-3 the Bible was issued in a Malay translation by Melchior Leydekker and Georg Henrik Werndly, and the latter brought out a grammar of the language in 1736. But despite the attempts to preach in it, knowledge of the language did not penetrate particularly deeply. Malay was a means of communication among administrators, managers, merchants and rulers, and so it stayed. Given the highly devolved nature of Dutch imperial administration, which largely kept the native power chiefdoms in place and was mediated through them, this at first worked well.

但此后，马来语在荷属东印度群岛的使用历史并非一帆风顺。18世纪中叶，随着世界市场对爪哇咖啡的重视程度超过安汶香料，与爪哇统治者直接沟通的需求日益增长，而这些统治者对马来语的了解一直不甚透彻。斯坦福·莱佛士（1811-1816年）统治时期结束后，荷兰重新接管了该地区的行政管理，但情况已大不相同：荷兰东印度公司（VOC）因盈利能力崩溃于1795年被解散，因此，管理者必须与当地民众保持密切联系。1811年的一项法令要求官员必须掌握爪哇语。莱佛士本人在接管后非常赞同这一做法，他在1813年评论道：“此前与当地居民的沟通主要依靠不识字的翻译，或者即便直接沟通，也只能使用一种因葡萄牙语和荷兰语的传入而变得混乱不堪的马来语方言。” ²³

But the subsequent history of the language as used in the Dutch Indies was not a smooth one. In the mid-eighteenth century, as world markets came to value coffee from Java over spices from Ambon, the need grew to have direct dealings with the Javanese rulers, whose knowledge of Malay had never been good. The return of Dutch administration after the British interregnum under Stamford Raffles (1811-16) was on a new basis: the VOC had been abolished in 1795 after a collapse in its profitability, and there was a new concern for administrators to be in contact with the subject population. A decree of 1811 called for officials to know Javanese. Raffles himself, when he took over, was very much in favour, opining in 1813: ‘Hitherto the communication with inhabitants of the country has been chiefly through illiterate Interpreters, or when direct, through the medium of a barbarous dialect of Malays, confounded and confused by the introduction of Portuguese and Dutch.’²³

但荷兰人重新掌权后，围绕爪哇语和马来语的相对地位展开了一场持续整个十九世纪的争论，1827年、1837年和1839年的决议再次提倡马来语。掌握大多数人的语言的实用价值显而易见，但令人尴尬的事实是，爪哇语拥有复杂的语调变化和区分不同礼貌程度的亚语言，其学习难度远高于马来语。结果始终不尽如人意，大多数官员最终还是回归了他们那蹩脚且不体面，但始终实用的“公务马来语”（dienst-Maleisch），这种语言被不太尊重地称为“胡言乱语马来语”（ brabbel-Maleisch ）或“笨拙马来语”（ klontong-Maleisch）。²⁴

But when the Dutch were back in charge, there followed a controversy, which was to last throughout the nineteenth century, concerning the relative weight to be given to Javanese and Malay, with resolutions in 1827, 1837 and 1839 promoting Malay again. The practical value of knowing the actual language of a majority of the people was clear, but the embarrassing fact remained that Javanese, with elaborate inflexions and distinct sub-languages marking different levels of politeness, was far harder to learn tolerably than Malay. Results were never good, and most officials reverted to their broken and undignified, but always serviceable, dienst-Maleisch (’service-Malay’), known less respectfully as brabbel-Maleisch or klontong-Maleisch (’jabber-’ or ‘clod-Malay’).²⁴

^{尽管马来语存在诸多缺陷（直到1901年}才制定了标准的罗马化拼写系统），但它最终成为了印度尼西亚的官方语言，并被冠以“印尼语”（Bahasa Indonesia）之名。然而，即使在今天，印尼也只有1700万至3000万人以马来语为母语，这或许仅占能将其作为第二语言使用人数的十分之一。相比之下，以爪哇语为母语的人口高达7500万，而印尼境内使用的语言更是多达726种。荷兰人通过其断断续续的政策，成功地为他们曾经的殖民地赋予了一种通用语言，却未能赋予他们自己的语言。

For all its faults (a standard system of Romanised spelling was specified only in 1901²⁵) it is this Malay which has become the official language of the state of Indonesia, under the wishful title of Bahasa Indonesia. Even today, though, only 17-30 million people there actually have it as a first language, perhaps a tenth of those who can use it as a second language. Compare this with the 75 million whose first language is Javanese, and the 726 languages that are listed as spoken somewhere within Indonesia. The Dutch, through their fitful policy, had succeeded in giving a common language to their old colony, but not their own.

法语国家组织

La francophonie

法语是一位女性。这些女人是美丽的，是火热的，是谦虚的，是哈迪的，是触摸的，是性感的，是贞洁的，是高贵的，是家庭的，是福勒的，是圣人的，都是你的目标，也是不忠的人。

La langue franšaise est une femme. Et cette femme est si belle, si fière, si modeste, si hardie, si touchante, si voluptueuse, si chaste, si noble, si familière, si folle, si sage, qu’ on l’ aime de toute son šme, et qu’ on n’ est jamais tenté de lui ětre infidèle.

法语就像一位女性。这位女性如此美丽，如此骄傲，如此谦逊，如此大胆，如此动人，如此丰腴，如此贞洁，如此高贵，如此亲切，如此疯狂，如此智慧，以至于人们会全心全意地爱她，并且永远不会想要背叛她。

The French language is a woman. And that woman is so beautiful, so proud, so modest, so bold, so touching, so voluptuous, so chaste, so noble, so familiar, so mad, so wise, that one loves her with all one’s soul, and is never tempted to be unfaithful to her.

阿纳托尔·法朗士，1844-1924年

Anatole France, 1844-1924

这句法语使用者和爱好者耳熟能详的引语，虽然语气明显，却也极具法国特色，充满了自恋和自鸣得意。^*法国人热衷于认为他们的语言拥有独特的优点，甚至——考虑到这种情感化的民族中心主义观点，这着实令人费解——他们还认为法国语言比其他语言更理性。或许比其他一心征服世界的国家更坦诚，他们开始宣称自己正在履行一项文明使命，这项使命超越了为自己谋取海外利益和为他们的上帝赢得外国信徒。

This quotation, widely known to speakers and lovers of French, is eminently but characteristically self-conscious and self-regarding.^* The French have taken enthusiastically to the notion that their language has particular virtues, even—and this is curious for such an emotional and ethnocentric idea—that it is more rational than other languages. Perhaps more honestly than others set on global conquests, they came to assert that they were fulfilling a mission civilisatrice which went beyond the making of foreign profits for themselves, and foreign converts for their God.

就法语母语者和第二语言使用者群体（即所谓的“法语国家组织”）的实际扩张而言，其结果^并不显著，至少与它的直接竞争对手（以及邻国）相比是如此：法语目前在全球拥有7700万母语使用者（其中三分之二在法国本土），另有5100万第二语言使用者。^†这使得法语在全球语言人口排名中位列第十，实际上是欧洲主要语言中人口最少的语言，甚至比德语还要少——德语在欧洲以外几乎无人使用。

The outcome, in terms of actual expansion of the language community of native and second-language speakers, what they call la francophonie,^* has been modest, at least by the standards of its direct competitors (and neighbours): French can now count 77 million native speakers worldwide (two-thirds of them in France itself), and another 51 million second-language speakers.^† This places it tenth in the list of language populations, effectively the smallest of the major European languages, and less populous even than German, which is hardly spoken at all outside its home continent.

法国人在欧洲

French in Europe

法语起源于高卢地区使用的罗曼语族语言，而高卢地区通常被认为是法兰克人的领地。法语的现代名称franšais [frásέ] 源自日耳曼语形容词frankisk，经由拉丁语化为franciscus。由于政治和地形的原因，法语逐渐以东北部法兰西岛地区的方言为代表和主导。法兰西岛拥有众多可通航的河流，流向各处，因此是一个天然的交通枢纽。这里汇聚了多种方言，彼此间的差异也因此得以消除。此外，自克洛维一世时期（公元五世纪末）起，法兰克王室的宫廷大多位于法兰西岛境内。不同的城市兴衰更替，但到了十三世纪，巴黎显然享有特殊的声望；一位诗人写道：

French is by origin the species of Romance spoken in Gaul, which was broadly taken to be the realm of the Franks. Its modern name for itself, franšais [frásέ], comes from the Germanic adjective frankisk, through the Latinisation franciscus. For political and topographical reasons, it came to be typified and led by the dialect of the Ile-de-France region in the north-east. The Ile-de-France has many navigable rivers heading in different directions, hence is a natural crossroads. And so it was a place where speakers of many dialects met, and differences were levelled out. What is more, from the time of Clovis (late fifth century) it mostly had the royal court of the Franks somewhere within it. Different cities flourished and waned, but by the thirteenth century the city of Paris evidently enjoyed a particular cachet; a poet wrote:

Si m' escuse de mon langage 请原谅我的语言，

Si m’ escuse de mon langage Excuse my language,

粗鲁的，malostru et sauvage 粗鲁的，笨拙的和野蛮的，

Rude, malostru et sauvage rude, ungainly and wild,

Car nés ne sui pas de Paris。 因为我不是巴黎人。²⁶

Car nés ne sui pas de Paris. for I am not a native of Paris.²⁶

法国早期历史上的一个里程碑是1539年的《维莱科特雷法令》。该法令中，弗朗索瓦一世国王除其他诸多规定外，还要求所有官方文件，无论是法院文件还是教区登记簿，都必须以法语母语书写，不得使用其他语言，尤其不得使用拉丁语。²⁷然而，尽管措辞听起来亲切自然，国王实际上指的是他自己的母语，而非臣民的母语：该法令被解读为要求使用巴黎法语，因此在普罗旺斯语区引发了“奇特的抱怨”（merveilleuses complaintes）。 ²⁸从此以后，法国政治中心开始重视语言问题，并采取行动在官方层面强制推行语言的一致性，尽管在其统治范围内仍然存在着不同的口语。

A milestone in the early history of French was the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterěts in 1539, by which King Franαois I, among many other provisions, required that official documents, whether from courts or parish registers, should all be produced en langage maternel fronαois et non autrement—in French mother tongue, and not otherwise, specifically not in Latin.²⁷ But despite the homely-sounding phrase, the king was in fact referring to his own mother tongue, not that of his subjects: the act was interpreted as requiring the use of Parisian French, and so provoked merveilleuses complaintes (’wondrous complaints’) in the Provençal-speaking south.²⁸ The French political centre was henceforth to be language conscious, and to take action to enforce consistency at the official level, despite the persistence of different spoken languages in its realms.

法语究竟是一种什么样的语言？从听觉上看，法语与其罗曼语族亲属语言的一个主要区别在于，几乎所有音节末尾的元音都消失了，后来辅音也消失了。（末尾的a通常保留下来，但发音减弱为模糊的 [ē] 音，类似于“呃”）。这种松散的发音导致了语法上的重大变化，因为拉丁语中意义丰富的词尾变化系统（屈折变化）失效了，至少在标记名词在句子中的功能以及动词的人称（我、你、他/她/它）方面是如此。因此，法语成为一种词序相当严格的语言，并且句子开头会出现一串串短代词。拉丁语中的dico tibi illud（我告诉你）在法语中是je te le dis [žētētēdi]，而拉丁语中用来标记主语“我”的词尾 -o 实际上被可分离的主语前缀je [žə] 所取代。^但在其他方面，法语与葡萄牙语颇为相似，例如用鼻音化的鼻音代替音节末尾的 n 和 m，将 y 的发音改为 [ž]，以及在元音之间将 s 浊化为 [z]。例如，通用罗曼语的unum bonum vinum rubium（意为“上好的红葡萄酒”）在法语中变成了un bon vin rouge。元音后的 l 大多变为 [w]（如同在伦敦东区英语和河口英语中一样），并用 u 来书写：maledictum（意为“被诅咒的”）变成了maudit，pellem（意为“皮肤”）变成了peau，collum（意为“脖子”）变成了cou。

What sort of language was French? To the ear, a major characteristic of French among its Romance cousins was the loss of almost all vowels in final syllables, and later of final consonants. (Final a usually survived, but was reduced to an indistinct [ē] ‘uh’ sound.) This slack pronunciation led to some major changes in the grammar, due to the breakdown of the Latin system of meaningful word endings (inflexion), at least in so far as they marked the function of nouns in sentences, and the person (I vs you vs he/she/it) of verbs. So French became a language with a rather rigid word order, and strings of short pronouns up at the front of sentences. Where Latin had dico tibi illud, ‘I tell you that’, French has je te le dis [žētētēdi], and the Latin ending -o to mark the subject ‘I’ has effectively been replaced by a separable subject prefix je [žə].^* But in other ways, French was rather like Portuguese, replacing n and m at the end of syllables with a nasalised twang, changing its y sound to [ž], and voicing s to [z] when it came between vowels. Common Romance unum bonum vinum rubium, ‘a good wine red’, became in France un bon vin rouge. L after a vowel mostly changed to [w] (as it does in Cockney and Estuary English), and was written with u: maledictum, ‘cursed’, came out as maudit, pellem, ‘skin’, as peau, collum, ‘neck’, as cou.

法语也曾遭受过一些极端的元音窒息现象的影响，尤其是所谓的中元音e和o：以至于几个世纪以来，法语的精确发音发生了很大的变化，当然，如果人们的双元音发音不够正确，语言势利眼也会有相当大的空间。这些过程对法语拼写造成了严重破坏，以至于很久以前写的（和发音大致相同）seniōres rēgālēs fāmōsī dēbent habēre unum bellum palātium，“著名的皇家领主必须拥有一座漂亮的宫殿”，最初的发音与现在的拼写非常相似，即les seigneurs royaux fameux doivent avoir un beau palais，但后来发音却完全不同了：[le seiñœr rwayo famœ dwavt avwar œT bo paləP]。

And French was also prey to some extreme processes of vowel strangulation, especially of what are called mid vowels, e and o: so much so that its precise pronunciation has varied greatly down the centuries, and of course been given considerable scope for language snobbery, if people’s diphthongs did not come out just right. These are the processes that have played havoc with French spelling, so that what was long ago written (and pronounced, more or less) seniōres rēgālēs fāmōsī dēbent habēre unum bellum palātium, ‘famous royal lords must have a fine palace’, came first to be pronounced much as it is now spelt, les seigneurs royaux fameux doivent avoir un beau palais, but then went on to sound quite different: [le seiñœr rwayo famœ dwavt avwar œT bo paləP].

公元二千纪初，这种语言开始向法国以外传播。值得注意的是，1066年，诺曼入侵者将其带到了英吉利海峡以北，而他们自己使用这种语言也只有几代人的时间。（参见第十二章“耐力考验：击退诺曼法语”，第458页。）事实证明，这种语言的传播并非一成不变。它作为英格兰精英阶层的语言繁荣了两个多世纪，但逐渐与法兰西岛地区失去了联系。正如乔叟在十四世纪末写到他的女修道院院长时所说：

In the early second millennium AD, this language began to spread outside France. Notably, in 1066 it was transplanted north of the English Channel, by Norman invaders, who themselves had been speaking it only for a couple of generations. (See Chapter 12, ‘Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French’, p. 458.) As it turned out, the advance of the language was not permanent. It flourished for over two centuries as a language for the elite in England, but gradually lost touch with the Ile-de-France. As Chaucer wrote of his Prioress towards the end of the fourteenth century:

她用法语说得非常流利，而且很优雅。

斯特拉特福德学校毕业后，鲍伊

先生要去帕里斯，因为他要雇佣一个不知名的人^。29

And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly

After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe

For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe.²⁹

随后黑死病爆发：随之而来的是一场社会变革，讲英语的平民得以在英国城市中担任更重要的职位。法语在英国逐渐消亡。^*

Then came the Black Death: a social revolution followed, and English-speaking commoners were able to move into more influential positions in the English cities. French died out in England.^*

大约在同一时期，十字军东征也使法语传播到其本土之外，但方向却截然相反。这些军事行动主要得到了法国的支持，并且成功地在巴勒斯坦建立了法兰克人的统治，一直延续到十二世纪。然而，这些语言社群并没有在十三世纪穆斯林的收复失地运动中长期存在。不过，一个长期的影响是，它使“法兰克人”与“在东方广泛存在的欧洲人”这一概念建立了一种特殊的联系——这体现在阿拉伯语中广泛使用的指代欧洲人的词汇“ feringī”以及至今仍然适用的术语“lingua franca”（通用语），后者指的是一种用于更广泛交流的非官方语言，最初在黎凡特地区使用。^†

About the same time, the Crusades also spread French outside its native soil, but in the opposite direction. These military escapades derived most of their support from France, and they did succeed in setting up Frankish domains in Palestine which lasted out the twelfth century. Nevertheless, the language communities did not long survive the Muslim reconquests in the thirteenth. One long-term effect, though, was to create a special association of ‘the Frank’ with the idea of a European at large in the East—seen in the widespread Arab term for a European, feringī, and the still useful term lingua franca, denoting an unofficial language of wider communication, which was first used in the Levant.^†

在法国政府开始认真致力于向海外扩张其权力和语言之前，巴黎法语标准就已经传播到了邻国。比利时和瑞士的疆域内一直都有罗曼语族使用者，自罗曼语族存在以来，两国从未尝试建立与之竞争的国家标准。日内瓦拥有其独特的罗曼语方言——萨瓦方言，但自13世纪以来，官方事务一直使用法语；在宗教改革战争期间，日内瓦实际上是法国新教徒的中心。再往南是萨瓦、尼斯和摩纳哥。这些地区都与阿尔卑斯山脉有着历史渊源，并且长期以来一直抵制并入法国本土。但它们最终大多接受了法语。

The Parisian standard for French spread to neighbouring countries before the French state started its serious efforts to spread its power and language abroad. Neither Belgium nor Switzerland, whose boundaries have always included Romance speakers as long as both the boundaries and the language have existed, ever attempted to set up a competing national standard. Geneva had its own distinct Romance dialect, Savoyard, but has used French for official business since the thirteenth century; it was the effective capital of the French Protestants during the wars of the Reformation. Farther south are Savoy, Nice and Monaco. They all had historic links across the Alps, and long resisted becoming part of metropolitan France. But they have largely accepted its language.

为什么法语在欧洲，尤其是在向东传播的过程中，与高雅文化建立了如此紧密的联系？根本原因在于法国人口的增长和农业财富的积累；法国的富人能够负担得起最好的东西，他们的品味也极具影响力。^法国是中世纪和近代早期欧洲人口密度最高的国家，因此往往成为其他国家的标杆。法语成为欧洲商人的通用语言。正是由于地理中心地位，巴黎成为了法国的十字路口，而法国本身也成为了西欧基督教世界的十字路口。1164年，索尔兹伯里的约翰写信给托马斯·贝克特：“我绕道去了巴黎。当我看到食物的丰盛、人民的幸福、神职人员所受到的尊重、整个教会的庄严和荣耀，以及哲学家们丰富多彩的活动时，我惊叹不已，仿佛看到了雅各的天梯，它的顶端直插云霄，天使在上面上下穿梭。^”

Why did French gain such an association with high culture in Europe, especially spreading eastward? The fundamental reason was the growth of France’s population and agricultural wealth; the rich of France could afford the best, and their taste was influential.^§ France was the most densely populated country in medieval and early modern Europe, and so tended to set the standard for the rest. French became the business language of European merchants. And the same principle of geographical centrality that had made Paris the crossroads of France made France itself the crossroads of west European Christendom. In 1164 John of Salisbury wrote to Thomas à Becket: ‘I took a detour by Paris. When I saw the abundance of foods, the happiness of the people, the consideration accorded to the clergy, the majesty and glory of the whole Church, the diverse activities of the philosophers, I thought I was seeing, filled with admiration, Jacob’s ladder, its top touching the sky and angels passing up and down upon it.’³⁰

这种情况直到十九世纪才有所改变。法国仍然是欧洲最富裕、人口最多的国家；其地理优势无人能撼动，直到欧洲政治权力中心扩展到西欧以外。诚然，十五世纪文艺复兴时期意大利城邦的崛起以及十六世纪的宗教改革动摇了法语的文化主导地位，因为法国国王选择坚定地将法国与天主教会联系起来。法国本身一度不再是世界中心，但宗教改革促使许多有影响力的法语使用者向东迁徙：法国新教徒胡格诺派在荷兰语和德语地区定居，法语出版业蓬勃发展，尤其是在荷兰边境地区。宗教改革进一步推动了法语作为一种文化语言向东传播的势头。

This situation did not change until the nineteenth century. France remained the richest and most populous country in Europe; its geographical advantages simply could not be challenged until the power base of European politics spread beyond western Europe. Certainly, the cultural predominance of French was shaken by the rise of the Italian city-states in the fifteenth-century Renaissance, and by the sixteenth-century Reformation, since the French king chose to associate France resolutely with the Catholic Church. France itself ceased to be the centre of the action for a time, yet the Reformation prompted many influential French speakers to flee eastward: Huguenots, the French Protestants, took up residence in the Dutch- and German-speaking lands, and there was an explosion of French-language publishing, especially just over the border in the Netherlands. The Reformation added to the French language’s eastward momentum as a language of culture.

十七世纪，法国在欧洲的实力和影响力达到了顶峰，这主要体现在路易十三（1610-1643）和著名的“太阳王”路易十四（1643-1715）的长期统治时期。法国日益自满，开始反思自身的文化特质。如同所有享有盛誉的国家一样，法国人开始寻找能够解释其成功的独特优势。他们逐渐发现，语言本身就蕴含着卓越的品质。路易十三的首相黎塞留红衣主教于1635年创立了法兰西学院，其宗旨超越了实用层面：根据学院章程，其主要职能是“为我们的语言制定规则，使其纯净、优美，并能够胜任艺术和科学的论述”。

In the seventeenth century, French power and influence in Europe reached their height, during the long reigns of Louis XIII, 1610-43, and of Louis XIV, the famed Roi Soleil, ‘Sun King’, 1643-1715. Increasingly complacent, France began to reflect on its own cultural attributes. As all nations do when they enjoy pre-eminence, the French began to look for some particular virtues that could explain their success. Increasingly, they saw evidence of excellence in their language itself. Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s prime minister, founded the Académie Franαaise in 1635, with a concern that transcended the practical: by its statutes its principal function was ‘to give certain rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent and capable of treating the arts and sciences’.

这是语言意识发展的一个新阶段，也是世界上第一所致力于语言保护的学院的诞生。^*法国人对准确性和简洁性的特别关注在当时得到了充分体现。事实上，1539年《维莱科特雷特法令》中强制使用法语的条款之前，紧接着就有一条要求法庭判决表述清晰的条款：判决必须“写得如此清楚，以至于不会，也不可能出现任何歧义或不确定性，也不允许任何解释”。到了1637年，已颇有名气的哲学家勒内·笛卡尔发表了他的《方法论》。这部著作的一个显著特点是它用法语而非拉丁语写成，这或许体现了学院章程的激进精神。笛卡尔并非有意成为革命者；事实上，他在《论说集》中的一条格言是“遵循他所生活的人中最明智的人普遍接受的最温和、最远离极端的观点”，以及“改变自己的欲望，而不是改变世界的秩序”。 ³¹但在欧洲思想辩论的核心，他提出知识必须完全建立在清晰明确的观念之上。 ³²这种方法摒弃了对神圣启示的需要，是新颖而激进的，并被视为典型的法国思想。^*人们通常认为这标志着现代哲学和现代科学的开端，尽管对笛卡尔而言，他一如既往地谨慎行事，并未改变所有关于信仰和道德的实际问题。

This was a new step in language consciousness, the world’s first academy dedicated to the care of a language.^* The particular concern of the French for accuracy and concision was crystallised at the time. In fact, the article of the Ordinances of Villers-Cotterěts in 1539 which enjoined the use of French had been immediately preceded by one that required clarity of expression in court judgments: they were to be ‘done and written so clearly that there would not be, nor could be, any ambiguity or uncertainty, nor place to ask for interpretation’. Now in 1637 the already famous philosopher René Descartes published his Discours de la méthode. One notable feature of this work was that it was written in French, rather than Latin, acting perhaps in the radical spirit of the academy’s statutes. Descartes was not willingly a revolutionary; indeed, one of his maxims in the Discours was to ‘follow the most moderate opinions and those most remote from excess as were commonly received in practice by the most sensible of those he lived with’, and ‘change his desires rather than the order of the world’.³¹ But here, at the heart of the European intellectual debate, he proposed that knowledge must be founded exclusively on clear and distinct ideas.³² Abolishing the need for divine revelation, this approach was new and radical, and came to be seen as quintessentially French.^* It is often held to mark the beginning of modern philosophy and modern science, even if for Descartes, playing it safe as ever, it left all practical matters of faith and morals unchanged.

法国人对自身语言优势的自信很快也被其他一些没那么幸运的人所认同。笛卡尔的伟大继承者莱布尼茨（1646-1716）虽然是莱比锡人，但他所有的主要著作都是用法语写成的。法国文化的智识优越性似乎成了一种自我实现的预言。在那个时代，要想被精英阶层广泛阅读，就必须用法语写作。

And the French belief in their linguistic advantages soon came to be shared by others not so fortunate. Descartes’ great successor Leibniz (1646-1716), though a German from Leipzig, wrote all his major works in French. The intellectual superiority of French culture had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. To be read widely by the elite, one simply had in these days to write in French.

十七世纪末，法国文化，尤其是其古典剧作家高乃依、拉辛和莫里哀的作品，风靡整个欧洲，凡尔赛宫更是宫廷礼仪的典范。法语小说在当时是富裕年轻女士们最喜爱的消遣。尤其在欧洲那些文化自信度较低的地区，上流社会对法语的流利程度格外重视：瑞典、波兰，以及最重要的俄罗斯。自叶卡捷琳娜大帝（1762-1796）统治时期起，法语在俄罗斯正式成为上流社会的通用语言。那个时代的伟大智者伏尔泰曾欣喜地表示，阿斯特拉罕有人说法语，莫斯科也有法语教师。 ³³在托尔斯泰的《战争与和平》中，这部小说的故事背景设定在下一代，其中相当一部分对话，包括开篇几句， ^† ——大概是为了追求真实感——并非用俄语而是用法语写成。

In the late seventeenth century, French culture, especially its classic dramatists Corneille, Racine and Molière, enjoyed a vogue throughout Europe, and Versailles set the standard everywhere for court style and etiquette. Novels in French were everywhere a favourite amusement for rich young ladies. It was especially in the areas of Europe with least cultural self-confidence that the elite set a high value on fluency in French: Sweden, Poland and above all Russia, where starting in the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-96) French became established as the language of polite society. Voltaire, the great wit of the age, rejoiced famously that there were French speakers in Astrakhan, and French language teachers in Moscow.³³ In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a novel whose action is set in the following generation, substantial parts of the dialogue, including the opening lines,^† are written—presumably for realism—not in Russian but in French.

正是在这一时期，法语取代拉丁语成为外交语言，使其与优雅和影响力又多了一层联系。到1642年，黎塞留政府已开始用法语与大多数北方邻国通信；但西班牙、意大利和瑞士仍然抵制法语，坚持使用本国语言。在16世纪下半叶，法国在与神圣罗马帝国（其官方语言为德语）的谈判中，逐渐说服对方将交流语言从拉丁语改为法语。到了17世纪，自1712年《拉施塔特条约》签订后，双方正式改用法语。条约也开始用法语书写，即使是与法国没有直接联系的国家也不例外。例如，丹麦在1691年的《哥本哈根贸易条约》中使用了法语，俄罗斯和奥斯曼土耳其在1774年于库克凯纳尔贾（今保加利亚的凯纳尔贾）签订的和平条约中也使用了法语。³⁴ 19世纪初拿破仑试图征服整个欧洲之后，法国的普遍受欢迎程度显然大幅下降，但法语直到20世纪才停止发挥其普遍的中间人作用，具有讽刺意味的是，这一转变正是在凡尔赛宫发生的。在第一次世界大战后举行的1919年和平会议上，美国人和英国人坚持用自己的语言进行谈判，从而确保了条约以法语和英语两种语言起草和公布。

It was in this period that French also replaced Latin as the language of diplomacy, giving it another link with elegance and influence. By 1642 Richelieu’s government had been corresponding in French with most of their northerly neighbours: but Spain, Italy and Switzerland had kept up resistance to it, preferring their own languages. In the second half of that century, in negotiations with the Holy Roman Empire (whose domestic language was German), the French gradually presuaded them to shift the language of communication from Latin to French. In the next century, from the Treaty of Rastatt in 1712, the two sides switched to French exclusively. Treaties came to be written in French, even by powers with no direct French connections. The Danes used it for their traité de commerce de Copenhague in 1691, and the Russians and Ottoman Turks in the terms of their 1774 peace made at Küαük Kainarca (now Kaynarja in Bulgaria).³⁴ The general popularity of France itself evidently took a dive after Napoleon’s attempts in the early nineteenth century to conquer the whole of Europe, but French ceased to play its general intermediary role only in the twentieth century, ironically at Versailles itself, when during the 1919 peace conference held after the First World War the Americans and the British insisted on working in their own language, and so ensured that the treaty was drafted and published in both French and English.

第一帝国

The first empire

那么，法国海外地区的情况又如何呢？这里的发展与法语在欧洲稳步而稳固的传播截然不同。在欧洲，法语几乎是自发地成为精英阶层的尊贵语言。法语在海外的传播很大程度上是王室政策的结果。

What of le franšais d’ outre-mer, French overseas? Developments here were very different from the steady, and sturdy, spread of French round Europe through which it became, almost by spontaneous acclaim, the prestige language for elites. The projection of French overseas was very much a result of royal policy.

这项政策经历了两次由法国国王主导的殖民扩张浪潮，其间穿插着十八世纪下半叶的全面战败和通货紧缩。这两次扩张都雄心勃勃——1714年和1914年，法国都拥有世界第二大殖民帝国（按陆地面积计算）^* ——但除了加勒比海地区糖业巨头的领地外，每次扩张都只产生了一个吸引大量法国移民的地区：十七、十八世纪的加拿大和十九世纪的阿尔及利亚。在这两个地区，法国及其殖民者都未能长期维持政治控制；因此，法国的帝国主义在语言影响方面更接近荷兰，而非其他欧洲竞争对手。也就是说，法语只有在其殖民者即使在外国（特别是英国）统治下，也保持了稳固的身份认同和庞大人口的地方才能延续下去：法语在加拿大得以生存和发展，正如某种形式的荷兰语在南非保持了强大的影响力一样。阿尔及利亚局势因政治因素而变得扑朔迷离。^*但在其他殖民地，法语即便幸存下来，也只是作为精英阶层的通用语。

The policy came in two fits of colonial expansion directed by the French king, punctuated by comprehensive defeat and deflation in the second half of the eighteenth century. These fits of expansion were both extremely ambitious—in 1714, and again in 1914, France held the second-largest colonial empire by land area in the world^*—but, aside from the sugar barons’ domain in the Caribbean, each of them produced only one territory that was to attract substantial French immigration: Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Algeria in the nineteenth. In neither case was France, or its settlers, long able to retain political control; and so French imperialism has been more like Dutch in its linguistic effects than any of its other European competitors. That is to say, the French language has persisted only where its settlers have retained a solid identity and a large population, even under foreign (specifically British) domination: French has survived and grown in Canada, just as Dutch (of a kind) has remained strong in South Africa. The situation in Algeria is clouded by politics.^* But in the other colonies the French language has survived, if at all, as a lingua franca for the elite.

尽管法国在十五世纪已是强国，但它并未参与最早的探险航行。不过，在接下来的几代人中，北美还有大片土地等待着被征服。法国国王派遣雅克·卡蒂埃去寻找通往东方的西北航道，结果却发现了圣劳伦斯河，并在1534年至1536年间沿河探索至魁北克和蒙特利尔（当时称为斯塔达科纳和霍切拉加）。^†后来，皮毛商人和传教士进一步扩大了法国可以占领的新大陆范围：1603年至1615年，塞缪尔·德·尚普兰进入五大湖区；1673年，马凯特神父和路易·乔利埃向南进入密西西比河；1678年至1682年，罗伯特·卡维利耶·德·拉萨尔绘制了密西西比河全程直至墨西哥湾的地图。法国由此绕过并包围了沿大西洋沿岸不断扩张的英国殖民地。

Although it was already a major power in the fifteenth century, France was not a player in the earliest voyages of exploration. Still, there was plenty of North America left to be claimed in the next few generations. Jacques Cartier, sent by the French king to discover a north-west passage to the East, discovered instead the St Lawrence river and explored it as far as Quebec and Montreal (then Stadacona and Hochelaga) in 1534-6.^† Later, fur traders and missionaries enlarged the part of the new continent that could be claimed for France: in 1603-15 Samuel de Champlain entered the Great Lakes; in 1673 Père Marquette and Louis Jolliet broke out southward into the Mississippi; and in 1678-82 Robert Cavelier de la Salle charted its whole course down to the Gulf of Mexico. France had thereby outflanked and surrounded the English colonies, which were being strung out along the Atlantic coast.

然而，当时的局势并不稳定，因为英国殖民者的人数远远超过法国人，十七世纪中期或许是法国人的四十倍；一个世纪后，当法国殖民者的人口增长了十倍时，英国殖民者的人数仍然是法国人的二十倍。35^可以说，宗教改革及其后法国新教徒的驱逐是造成两国力量失衡的根源。正如我们所见，他们的离开促进了法语作为文化和高雅思想语言在中欧和东欧的传播。但与此同时，法国也失去了大量愿意移居海外的人口，这些人正是构成英国十三殖民地骨干的清教徒、冒险家和乌托邦主义者。新法兰西的移民出生率虽然很高，但始终未能像新英格兰那样吸引大量移民。

It was an unstable situation, however, since the English colonists heavily outnumbered the French, perhaps by forty to one in the mid-seventeenth century: they would still be twenty times more numerous a century later, when the French settler population had multiplied by ten.³⁵ Arguably, the expulsion of French Protestants in the Reformation and afterward was at the root of this imbalance between the two powers. As we have seen, their departure had seeded the spread of French, as the language of culture and high thinking, into central and eastern Europe. But by the same token, France had lost the mass of its population of willing emigrants, the kind of puritans, adventurers and Utopians who formed the backbone of Britain’s Thirteen Colonies. Nouvelle-France boasted a meteoric birth rate among those who came and stayed, but never became a magnet to immigrants equal to New England.

在同一时期，法国在黎塞留的统治下，主要在国内建立了殖民地，包括加勒比海的马提尼克岛（1625年）和瓜德罗普岛（1635年），以及圭亚那大陆的卡宴（1637年）；在大西洋彼岸，法国声称拥有西非海岸的塞内加尔（1639年）和东部的马达加斯加（1643年）。最远的是一位名叫亚历山大·德·罗德斯的法国耶稣会传教士，他于1624年抵达了当时被称为交趾支那的印度支那东南部^。

In the same period, largely with Richelieu in charge at home, French settlements were also being planted on the Caribbean islands of Martinique (1625) and Guadeloupe (1635), and at Cayenne on the mainland in Guyana (1637); on the other side of the Atlantic, the French claimed Senegal on the west African coast (1639) and Madagascar in the east (1643). Farthest of all, a French Jesuit missionary, Alexandre de Rhodes, made it in 1624 to southeastern Indo-China, then known as Cochin-China.^*

然而，在法国声称拥有的广袤领土中，只有圣劳伦斯河地区（被称为新法兰西）和新斯科舍省（当时被称为阿卡迪亚，最初是卡迪，源自某个印第安人的名字）得到了法语殖民者的大规模定居。 *法国最初的政策^是希望“我们的儿子娶你们的女儿，我们成为一个民族”。不幸的是，这一目标并未如法国人所愿地实现，因为早期抵达的男性定居者往往会融入当地文化，并用他们未开化的母亲的语言抚养子女。1666年，在法国殖民统治三代之后，路易十四的殖民地大臣让-巴蒂斯特·科尔贝抱怨说，想要进行贸易（主要是毛皮贸易）的法国人仍然不得不使用当地语言进行交流^。36

However, the only parts of the extensive territories claimed for France which received significant settlement by French-speaking colonists were the St Lawrence river area, known as la Nouvelle-France (New France), and Nova Scotia, then known as l’Acadie (originally la Cadie, derived from some Indian name).^* Here the original French policy had been to hope that ‘our sons will marry your daughters and we will become one people’. Unfortunately, this did not happen in a way that suited the French, since the early tendency was for arriving male settlers to go native, and bring up their children in their sauvage mothers’ languages. In 1666, after three generations of French colonial presence, Louis XIV’s minister for the colonies, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, complained that Frenchmen who wanted to trade—mostly for furs—still had to communicate in the natives’ language.³⁶

解决这一问题的部分方案是派遣受过良好教育的法国女孩（待嫁女孩）嫁给定居者，建立法语家庭。其中就包括著名的“国王之女”（ filles du Roy），她们大多是资产阶级家庭的孤儿，旅费、生活费，甚至在某些情况下还有嫁妆，都由国库承担。1665年至1673年间，约有900名“国王之女”被送往海外，以增加人口（根据1665年的人口普查，当时人口为3215人），并改善性别比例（男女比例为2:1）。尽管殖民地总督让·塔隆曾告诉科尔伯特，他更希望选择像男人一样能干活的乡村女孩，而不是这些娇弱的年轻女子，但事实证明，这笔投资是值得的。新法兰西的人口在1713年达到2万人，1755年达到5.5万人。生育率高达平均每名妇女生育7.8个孩子。虽然只有约40%的移民能说一口流利的法语，但超过一半的女性都能说，而且移民家庭的各种方言似乎在17世纪逐渐趋于一致，取而代之的是母子间习得的标准法语。1698年，海军总监曾评论道：“这里的人们说法语非常流利，没有任何口音。虽然这里融合了法国几乎所有省份的方言，但在加拿大各省却无法区分出任何一种方言。” ³⁷

Part of the solution to this was to send out well-brought-up French girls, filles à marier, to marry the settlers and create French-speaking homes. Among them were the famous filles du Roy, ‘king’s daughters’, mostly orphans from bourgeois families, whose travel and subsistence costs—and in some cases dowries—were borne by the Treasury. Some nine hundred of them were sent out between 1665 and 1673, to boost the population (3215 according to the census of 1665), and improve the sex ratio (2:1 male to female). Although the intendant of the colony, Jean Talon, told Colbert that he would have preferred village girls, ready to work like men, rather than these delicate young ladies, they seem to have been a good investment. The population of Nouvelle-France reached 20,000 in 1713 and 55,000 in 1755. The fertility rate averaged a whopping 7.8 children per woman. Although only some 40 per cent of the immigrants spoke un bon français, over half of the women did, and the variant dialects of the immigrant families seem to have been levelled out in the seventeenth century, in favour of standard French learnt at Mother’s knee. In 1698 the Controller-General of the navy remarked: ‘People speak here perfectly well without any bad accent. Although there is a mixture from almost all the provinces in France, none of their dialects can be distinguished in the Canadian provinces.’³⁷

而蒙卡尔姆侯爵，这位在1759年将魁北克城拱手让给英国人的法国将军，此前曾承认：“加拿大农民法语说得很好。” ³⁸

And the marquess of Montcalm, the French general who was to lose the city of Quebec to the British in 1759, had previously admitted: ‘The Canadian peasants speak French very well.’³⁸

1763年的《巴黎条约》宣告了法国在北美帝国的终结。尽管英国海军在大西洋的绝对优势最终导致了法国的败北，但美属法国还是屈服于英国殖民地压倒性的人口优势。 ^*然而，法国的战败并未彻底终结东北部的法语人口。尽管加拿大很快成为大量来自十三殖民地、不愿生活在独立的美国境内的英语保皇派的目的地，^{† 但}在欧洲人口仍然稀少的这片土地上，法语人口在已定居地区仍然占据绝对优势，大约是英语人口的七倍。据估计，1791年加拿大有14万法语人口和2万英语人口。§^此后，法语人口一直顽强地捍卫着他们的社群，其核心是天主教会、法国民法以及继续使用法语。

The Treaty of Paris in 1763 spelt the end of France’s empire in North America. American France yielded to the overpowering numbers in the British colonies, even if the coup de gršce had come from the dominance of the British navy in the Atlantic^* The French defeat did not, however, put paid to French-speaking in the north-east. Even though Canada soon became the destination for large numbers of English-speaking loyalists from the Thirteen Colonies, unwilling to live in an independent United States of America,^† the French were still vastly preponderant, approximately by a factor of seven, in the settled areas of what was still a territory with a small European population. It is estimated that in 1791 there were 140,000 francophones and 20,000 anglophones in Canada.^§ The French have since put up a redoubtable defence of their community’s existence, polarised around the Catholic Church, French civil law and the continued use of their language.

然而，越来越多的移民加入其中，他们或讲英语，或采用英语，到了下个世纪中叶，当欧洲人口约为150万时，法语使用者已不再是多数。而且，人口流动尚未达到顶峰。1821年至1910年间，又有230万人被接纳。³⁹ 1998年，法国人口达到3050万，其中670万人（占22%）以法语为母语，而60%的人从小就说英语。

They were, however, increasingly joined by immigrants who either spoke or adopted English, and certainly by the midpoint of the next century, when the European population was about 1.5 million, French speakers had ceased to be the majority. And the population movements had not yet peaked. Another 2.3 million were admitted between 1821 and 1910.³⁹ In 1998 the country’s population had reached 30.5 million, of whom 6.7 million or 22 per cent spoke French natively, as against 60 per cent brought up to speak English.

尽管结局令人失望，加拿大仍然是法语在海外成功传播的主要案例。但这绝非唯一的故事。法国在糖业也占据了重要地位，整个十七世纪，人口最多的法语殖民地实际上是法属安的列斯群岛、瓜德罗普岛和马提尼克岛：到1700年，那里居住着25000名法国人和70000名黑人奴隶。^他们的后裔至今仍生活在那里，人口刚刚超过一百万，都讲法语或法语克里奥尔语。海地也一样，在1697年通过海盗（法式冒险家）的行动成为法国领土后，也因糖业而繁荣起来，尽管法国统治者的统治在1804年被奴隶革命暴力终结。时至今日，那里仍然有大约750万人讲法语和法语克里奥尔语。法属其他殖民地要么是人口稠密地区的贸易站（如印度沿海的昌德纳戈尔、亚南、本地治里、卡莱卡尔和马埃岛），要么是通往印度海上航线的驿站（如塞内加尔、留尼汪岛和毛里求斯岛，以及（短暂存在的）马达加斯加），要么是规模更大但最终失败的征服行动的残余（如法属圭亚那）。^*这些殖民地从未吸引过大量欧洲移民，但几乎所有殖民地至今仍有小型法语社区存在，其中本地治里至今仍有4万法语人口；留尼汪岛有16.05万人讲法语，另有50万人（占该岛人口的90%）讲法语克里奥尔语。 ⁴¹

Despite this disappointing finale, Canada is the main success story of French as transplanted overseas. But it is certainly not the only story. France had also had a major piece of the action in the sugar business, and throughout the seventeenth century the most populous francophone colony had in fact been the French Antilles, Guadeloupe and Martinique: by 1700 they were home to 25,000 French and 70,000 black slaves.⁴⁰ Their descendants are still there, with a population now of just over a million, all speaking French, or French creoles. Haiti too, becoming French in 1697 through the action of pirates (filibusters), became prosperous in the same business, although the French owners’ term was ended violently by slave revolution in 1804. There too French and French creoles are spoken to this day, by some 7.5 million. The other colonies of the French Crown were either trading posts in highly populated regions (Chandernagore, Yanam, Pondicherry, Kāraikāl and Mahe along the coast of India), way-stations on naval routes to India (Senegal, the islands of Réunion and Mauritius, and (briefly) Madagascar) or the rumps of larger-scale conquests that never worked out (French Guiana).^* None of them ever attracted major settlement from Europe, though almost all of them host small francophone communities to this day, notably 40,000 still in Pondicherry; and 160,500 can speak French in Réunion, amid half a million (90 per cent of the island’s population) who speak a French creole.⁴¹

法国大革命开启了帝国战争的新阶段，但除了拿破仑在1798-1799年间略带浪漫色彩的埃及之行外，其余战争都发生在欧洲大陆；而且，不到一代人的时间，所有这些战争都以失败告终。具有讽刺意味的是，法国在近代早期最引以为傲的成就——法国大革命和拿破仑统治——对法语的传播几乎没有任何贡献，即便它们将讲法语的士兵派往了欧洲各地。

The French Revolution ushered in a new phase of imperial wars, but with the exception of Napoleon’s somewhat romantic foray to Egypt in 1798-9, they were all waged within the continent of Europe; and they all amounted, in less than a generation, to nothing at all. Ironically, the great claims to fame of France in the early modern period, the Revolution and the reign of Napoleon, contributed little if anything to the spread of the French language, even if they sent French-speaking soldiers all over Europe.

但是，随着1815年君主制的复辟，法国开始了新一轮的海外帝国主义扩张^。

But then, with the restoration of the monarchy in 1815, the French entered on a new bout of overseas imperialism.^†

第二帝国

The second empire

他们的动机错综复杂。在一次重要的事件中，法国的行为如同古罗马一般。1830年，法国试图清除地中海的海盗，结果却全面入侵阿尔及利亚，将这个原本属于奥斯曼帝国的省份割让给了法国。同样遵循罗马模式，随后涌入了大量移民（罗马人称之为“colōnī” ，法国人称之为“colons”），人数相当可观：到1847年，移民人数已达11万，并在接下来的一个世纪里增长到近百万。 ⁴²但这只是一个特例，尽管它在法国人对新帝国的构想中占据了最重要的地位。在许多其他情况下，法国的行动是出于传教士的怜悯或热情，例如在印度洋（科摩罗，1840年）和太平洋（社会联盟，1843年；塔希提岛，1846年；新喀里多尼亚，1853年）建立的保护国。在某种程度上，类似的动机似乎也促使法国在1817年至1850年间，从其位于塞内加尔的古老基地扩张势力范围，训练当地步兵（步兵）和神职人员，并开展抗击疟疾、修建学校和道路等工作。正是对基督教传教士的迫害，为法国在1859年入侵交趾支那提供了借口：到1887年，一个法属印度支那联盟控制了如今越南、柬埔寨和老挝的全部领土。

Their motives were mixed. In one important case, France acted like ancient Rome, when in 1830 an attempt to rid the Mediterranean of pirates ended up with the full-scale invasion of Algeria, detaching what had been a province of the Ottoman empire. Still in accord with the Roman model, this was followed by an influx of settlers (colōnī for the Romans, colons for the French), in fairly large numbers: there were already 110,000 of them in 1847, and their numbers rose to just under a million in the next century.⁴² But this was an exceptional case, even though it loomed largest in French conceptions of their new empire. In many other cases, French action was led by missionary compassion or zeal, as with the protectorates claimed in the Indian Ocean (Comores, 1840) and in the Pacific (in les īCles de la Société, 1843, Tahiti, 1846, Nouvelle-Calédonie, 1853). Similar motives, at some level, seem to have led to the expansion of French control from its ancient base in Senegal in the fifty years from 1817, training native infantry (tirailleurs) and priests and then taking action against malaria, and building schools and roads. It was persecution of Christian missions that gave France its justification for invading Cochin-China in 1859: by 1887 a French Union indochinoise controlled the whole of what is now Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

但这些殖民扩张发生之时，欧洲人正开始对自己在技术上凌驾于世界其他任何地方的优越性感到无比自豪。法国再次开始寻求对其成功的解释：不出所料，它开始将自己视为一个能够对世界产生积极影响的强权，不仅传播天主教和对法律的尊重，还传播共济会、圣西门主义的工业政策，简而言之，就是法兰西文明。将这一切与“在造福世界的同时获利”的雄心壮志结合起来并不难，因此，当法国（以及比利时）加入“殖民地争夺战”（英国称之为“瓜分非洲”）时，几乎没有人感到犹豫。

But these colonial acquisitions came at a time when Europeans were beginning to be highly impressed by their own technical superiority over people anywhere else in the world. Once again France began to look for explanations of its success: characteristically, it came to see itself as a power that could make a difference to the world for the better, spreading not just Catholic Christianity and respect for law, but also freemasonry, Saint-Simonian industrial policy, and in short la civilisation franαaise. It was easy to combine this with an ambition to do well while doing good, and so there were few reservations felt when France, and Belgium too, joined in ’la course aux colonies’, what Britain knew as ‘the scramble for Africa’.

在领土扩张的规模上，法国和英国无疑是最大的赢家：这两个帝国在十九世纪最后几十年里都实现了迅猛扩张。法国不仅从其在阿尔及利亚和塞内加尔的既有领土扩张，还在科特迪瓦（1842年）和加蓬（1843年）建立了新的桥头堡。首先，从1876年到1885年，法属赤道非洲从加蓬沿岸被分割出来，包括后来的加蓬、刚果、中非共和国和乍得；然后，从1883年到1894年，法属西非从西部和西南部被夺取，包括今天的塞内加尔、毛里塔尼亚、马里、几内亚、科特迪瓦、布基纳法索、尼日尔和贝宁。

The French and the British were the big winners in the sheer scale of territory acquired: both empires grew massively in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The French expanded from their existing possessions in Algeria and Senegal, but they also established new bridgeheads in Côte d’Ivoire (1842) and Gabon (1843). First, from 1876 to 1885, Afrique-Équatoriale Franαaise (French Equatorial Africa) was carved out from the Gabon shore, including what were to become Gabon, Congo, the Central African Republic and Chad; then from 1883 to 1894 Afrique-Occidentale Française (French West Africa) was taken from the west and south-west, comprising the modern Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger and Benin.

参与这场争夺的法语国家并非只有法国。1877年至1879年间，比利时国王利奥波德二世任命英国探险家亨利·斯坦利爵士为私人代理人，公然宣称对如今被称为刚果的地区拥有主权，这一主张于1885年被其他欧洲列强所接受。随后，在1896年，法国废黜了马达加斯加女王，并以在其原领地立即废除奴隶制为由为其行动辩护。不仅如此，法国还在地中海沿岸阿尔及利亚的邻国——突尼斯（1881年）和摩洛哥（1912年）——谋求保护权。

And the French were not the only francophones in the race. In 1877-9, Belgium’s King Léopold, adopting as his personal agent the British explorer Sir Henry Stanley, had brazenly claimed the area now known as the Congo, a claim accepted by the other European powers in 1885. Then, in 1896, the French went on to depose the queen of Madagascar, justifying their action by the immediate abolition of slavery in her old domains. And on top of it all, France was also claiming protectorates among Algeria’s neighbours along the Mediterranean coast, Tunisia in 1881, and Morocco in 1912.

到1913年，法语已成为非洲三分之一土地统治者的语言，其影响范围从北大西洋沿岸的阿特拉斯山脉一直延伸到东非大裂谷的大湖区。这种扩张堪比亚历山大的远征，或是七世纪穆斯林的伟大圣战：五十年前，法语在阿尔及利亚和塞内加尔以外的非洲地区还鲜为人知。

By 1913, French was the language of the rulers of a good third of Africa’s land area, from the Atlas mountains on the north Atlantic to the Great Lakes of the Rift Valley. It was an expansion to compare with the adventures of Alexander, or the great Muslim jihad of the seventh century: fifty years earlier, the language had not been heard in Africa outside Algeria and Senegal.

在许多方面，法国人竭力证明自己配得上他们突然获得的新领土，他们带来了道路、铁路和电报，用科学手段攻克了疟疾和其他热带疾病，还传播了基督教信仰、法语，以及——对少数特权阶层而言——对笛卡尔理性主义的欣赏。他们似乎成功地向其臣民灌输了一种观念：通往权力和独立的唯一可行途径在于掌握自身的技能：这种说服力是他们的理想之一，他们称之为“光芒四射”（ rayonnement）。与其他欧洲帝国相比，法国人更纠结于这样一个问题：他们对这些臣民的真正兴趣是什么？是剥削、同化、传教、教育，还是简单的政治联合？法国追求的是荣耀（la gloire），还是文明使命（sa mission civilisatrice）？法国人如此重视自身的文化，以至于他们无法将这些领土视为法国之外的任何事物：法兰西文明是不可分割的。法语被广泛用于行政管理，并被确立为中学和高等教育的教学语言，即使在像印度支那和北非这样有着悠久其他语言读写传统的地区也是如此。^*在大多数地方，殖民地居民都可以争取获得完整的法国公民身份。

In many ways, the French exerted themselves to be worthy of their sudden new domains, bringing roads, railways and the telegraph, scientific assaults on malaria and other tropical diseases, as well as the Christian faith, the French language, and—to a few privileged souls—an appreciation of Cartesian rationalism. They do seem to have succeeded in transmitting to their subjects a sense that the only practicable route to power and independence lay through mastery of their own skills: this kind of persuasion was one of their ideals, what they called rayonnement, ‘beaming’. Far more than other European empires, they struggled with the question of what their true interest in these subjects was: exploitation, assimilation, evangelisation, education or simple political association. Was it la gloire that France was seeking, or sa mission civilisatrice? Taking their own culture so seriously, the French could not see these domains as anything other than parts of France: la civilisation française was indivisible. Everywhere French was used for administration, and instituted as the language of instruction in secondary and higher education, even where—as in Indo-China and North Africa—there was an ancient tradition of literacy in some other language.^* Colonials could in most places aspire to full French citizenship.

但是，除了阿尔及利亚——那里的穆斯林居民远没有其他地区那样愿意将基督教征服者视为榜样——法国人在海外的人口总是太少，难以真正建立起自己的社会。将他们带到这些国家，或者让他们留在那里，都没有什么切实的经济理由，这一点很快就显现出来。与其他欧洲帝国的情况不同，典型的海外法国人仍然是军人、医生、传教士或教师。法国最杰出的军事家拿破仑曾戏称英国是“小商贩之国”（une nation de petits commerαants），但正是法国殖民地缺乏这类人才，才暴露出这些殖民地的不稳定性。与葡萄牙、西班牙、英国甚至荷兰的殖民地不同，法国帝国没有哪个地区能够吸引大规模移民。而且，19世纪和20世纪的法国政府既没有能力也没有意愿像17世纪那样资助任何移民。因此，除了阿尔及利亚以外，法语在世界各地仍然是统治精英的语言，即使——至少在非洲黑人社区——其他民众可能真心渴望法语的价值观。

But, except in Algeria—where the native, Muslim, population were far less ready to see their Christian conquerors as role models—the French were always too thin on the ground truly to propagate their own society. There were few solid economic reasons to bring them out to these countries, or to keep them there, and rather soon it showed. In contrast to what happened in the other European empires, the typical Frenchman abroad remained a military man, a doctor, a missionary or a teacher. Napoleon, the pre-eminent French soldier, had famously slighted England as ’une nation de petits commerαants’—a nation of shopkeepers—but it was precisely the lack of such people in the French colonies which demonstrated how unstable they were. Unlike Portuguese, Spanish, British or even Dutch possessions, there was no part of the French empire which attracted mass immigration. And the French government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not able or willing, as it had been in the seventeenth, to finance any emigration. Consequently, French remained, everywhere but Algeria, a language of the governing elite, even while—at least in black Africa—the rest of the population might be heartily aspiring to its values.

第一次世界大战结束后，随着德国和奥斯曼帝国的殖民地被瓜分，法语国家管辖下的殖民地数量有所增加。喀麦隆和多哥归属法国，卢旺达和布隆迪归属比利时。叙利亚和黎巴嫩也被置于法国的委任统治之下。但几乎所有这些殖民地都在第二次世界大战结束后的十五年内获得了独立。近东阿拉伯国家作为战后初期安排的一部分，被建立为独立的共和国。印度支那和北非，以及马达加斯加和科摩罗，不得不通过武力争取自由；撒哈拉以南非洲的大部分地区，在1960年经过恳切请求后获得了独立。太平洋、加勒比海和南美洲的小国实际上仍然是帝国的一部分，但它们现在是法兰西联盟的一部分：根据1946年10月27日全民公投通过的宪法，

The number of colonies under French-speaking administration grew after the end of the First World War, when the German and Ottoman possessions were parcelled out. Cameroon and Togo came to France, and Rwanda and Burundi to Belgium. Syria and Lebanon were also placed under a French mandate. But almost all were granted independence in the fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The Near Eastern Arab countries were established as independent republics as part of the immediate post-war settlement. Indo-China and North Africa, as well as Madagascar and the Comoros, had to win their freedom by force of arms; in sub-Saharan Africa, by and large they were granted it at their earnest entreaty in 1960. The tiny nations of the Pacific, the Caribbean and South America are still, in effect, part of the empire: but they are now part of the French Union: according to the constitution adopted by the referendum of 27 October 1946,

法国与海外人民建立了平等的权利和义务联盟，不分种族和宗教。

la France forme avec les peuples d’ outre-mer une Union fondée sur l’ égalité des droits et des devoirs, sans distinction de race ni de religion.

法国与海外人民结成联盟，该联盟建立在权利和义务平等的基础上，不分种族和宗教。

France forms with the overseas peoples a Union founded on equality of rights and duties, without distinction of race nor religion.

所有成员作为海外侨民（即来到法国时）均为法国公民。值得注意的是，语言并非该联盟消除歧视的方面之一：因为在联盟内，所有人的语言都应为法语。

And all its members as ressortissants (i.e. when they come to France) are French citizens. It is noticeable that language is not included as an aspect in which the Union is free from distinction: that is because in the Union, everyone’s language is expected to be French.

法语社群秉持对清晰和理性的明确尊重，力求自我规范，并形成整体的自我认知，其程度似乎远超其他任何社群。因此，它建立了一个国际性的政治、技术和文化组织——法语国家组织（la francophonie），这便是其鲜明的特色。令法国政府颇感欣慰的是，该组织的倡议并非来自法国，而是由一些杰出的第二语言使用者发起。当然，其中或许也存在某种政治动机：创始人包括突尼斯总统哈比卜·布尔吉巴、柬埔寨诺罗敦·西哈努克亲王、塞内加尔总统利奥波德·桑戈尔、黎巴嫩总统查尔斯·埃卢以及尼日尔总统哈马尼·迪奥里。尽管如此，法国仍然提供了该组织高达三分之二的预算。该组织于 1970 年 3 月 20 日在非洲中部尼日尔首都尼亚美成立，并定期举行峰会，各国内阁部长均会出席，第九次峰会于 2002 年在贝鲁特举行。其成员并不局限于法国的前殖民地；事实上，埃及最近就派出了秘书长布特罗斯·布特罗斯·加利：该组织的特点是强调某种概念或道德上的关联，而不是历史上的关联。

In conformity with its explicit respect for clarity and reason, the French-language community seeks to order itself, and have an overall conception of itself, apparently far more than any other. So it is characteritic that it has given itself an international political, technical and cultural organisation, known as la francophonie. It is a matter of some satisfaction to the French government that the initiative for this came not from France but from a number of distinguished second-language speakers. Still, there may perhaps have been a certain political motivation: the founders were President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, President Léopold Senghor of Senegal, Charles Hélou of Lebanon, and Hamani Diori of Niger. Nevertheless, France does provide up to two-thirds of the organisation’s budget. It was founded on 20 March 1970 at Niamey in Niger, central Africa, and has held summit meetings regularly, with cabinet ministers in attendance, the ninth at Beirut in 2002. Membership is not restricted to former colonies of France; indeed, Egypt recently provided the secretary-general, Boutros Boutros Ghali: characteristically it chooses to emphasise some conceptual or moral, rather than historic, relatedness.

令人颇感意外的是，法国目前的重点是保护和促进文化多样性，这在法语国家无疑是一种新现象，而且不乏一丝针对其宿敌盎格鲁-撒克逊人的“高卢式恶作剧”的意味。但这完全符合法国对人权进行深刻而有时甚至是客观思考的传统。然而，政治利益终究会凌驾于一切之上，近年来，法国政府甚至难以保护和促进其境内残存的语言多样性。例如，2002年教育部长旨在将布列塔尼语学校纳入国家教育体系，从而由国家为其提供资金，但这一举措却触犯了法国宪法中一项直到1992年才加入的条款——即法兰西共和国的官方语言是法语^。

Its current emphasis, rather surprisingly, is on protecting and enabling cultural diversity, certainly a novelty as a francophone preoccupation, and not without a whiff of l’ esprit malin, Gallic mischief, directed at the perennial rivals, les anglo-saxons. But it is well within the tradition of incisive, and sometimes disinterested, consideration of the rights of man. Political interests will out, however, and it has been difficult for the French state, in recent years, even to protect and foster such linguistic diversity as remains within its own domains. The action of the minister of education in 2002, for example, aimed at incorporating Breton-language schools into the state system, and so funding them nationally, fell foul of an article inserted into the French constitution as late as 1992—that the language of the French Republic is French.^*

第三罗马，以及所有俄罗斯

The Third Rome, and all the Russias

^†

但要将目光从欧洲移开，这的确很难。然而，话虽如此，亚洲——这或许真的是我们未来的出走之地——我再次强调！如果我们能够掌握这一理念，哪怕只是一部分，哦，那该是多么重要的根基啊！亚洲，我们亚洲的俄罗斯——这也是我们病入膏肓的根基，我们不仅需要让它焕发活力，更需要彻底地复活和重建它！我们需要的，是一个原则，一个新的原则，一种看待问题的新视角！

But to turn away from the window on Europe is hard, that is a fact. But, that being said, Asia—this could really be our exodus in our future—again I exclaim it! And if we could accomplish the mastery of that idea, even in part, oh, what a root would then be revitalized! Asia, our Asiatic Russia,—this too is our sick root, which we need not just to refresh, but utterly to resurrect and reconstruct! A principle, a new principle, a new view on the affair, here is what is necessary!

费奥多尔·M·陀思妥耶夫斯基，《格克特佩：亚洲对我们而言意味着什么？》，1881年，^第43页

Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Gök-Tepe: What Is Asia to Us?, 1881⁴³

俄语是最后一个由帝国传播的欧洲主要语言，它在许多方面都与其他语言不同。

Russian, the last of the great European languages spread by an empire, is in many ways unlike the others.

俄罗斯的疆域扩张并非依靠海上远征，而是主要依靠陆路军事征服；因此，它占据了从北欧平原故土向南和向东延伸的广袤地带。其疆界的扩张主要并非由商人或传教士完成，而是由半游牧的哥萨克骑兵、探险家和军人所为：并非出于事业或为基督赢得灵魂的责任，而是为了掠夺财富，并巩固其国家的全球利益。俄罗斯在其有意识的建国之初，既没有天然屏障抵御南部讲突厥语的鞑靼人，也没有天然屏障抵御西部讲斯拉夫语的波兰同胞。它位于其所认同的文化区域——基督教欧洲——的边缘；但它占据的平原易于骑马入侵者进入，并且河流纵横交错，通航便利。冰雪阻隔了它一年中的大部分时间通往公海。俄罗斯唯一的天然防御屏障在于其严酷的冬季、春秋两季湿热的土壤，以及敌人必须跨越的漫长距离才能攻入。这些条件有利于一个拥有纵深防御的大国的崛起和巩固：这个大国就是我们所说的俄罗斯。

Its domain was extended not by seaborne expeditions but overwhelmingly by military campaigns overland; hence it has come to occupy areas in a vast contiguous swath to the south and east from its homeland in the north European plain. Its bounds were expanded for the most part not by traders or missionaries, but by semi-nomadic Cossacks, explorers and military men: not out of enterprise, or a duty to win souls for Christ, but for reasons of rapine, and to buttress the global interests of its state. Russia began its conscious existence with no natural defences against the Turkic-speaking Tatars to its south, and it remained without natural defences against its Slavic-speaking cousins in Poland to the west. It was on the periphery of the cultural area with which it identified, Christian Europe; but it occupied a plain that was easily accessible to horse invaders, and also crossed by a network of navigable rivers. Ice denied it access to the open sea for most of the year. Its only natural defences lay in the severity of its winters, the sheer stickiness of its land in spring and autumn, and the vast distances that its enemies would need to cross in order to penetrate it. Conditions favoured the growth and consolidation of a single large power, with defence in depth: that power we call Russia.

然而，俄罗斯与其他欧洲成功帝国缔造者之间也存在一些相似之处。向东扩张至西伯利亚有着商业动机，户外运动爱好者为了获取毛皮而捕猎动物，正如法国人，以及后来的英国人在加拿大北部荒野所做的那样。在过去一千年的大部分时间里，俄罗斯东正教一直是俄罗斯身份认同的有力象征，^*它伴随着俄罗斯军队横跨东南欧、北亚和中亚直至太平洋的扩张。由于其语言明显是俄语的一种古老形式，这与英国国教的帝国做法尤为相似。正如19世纪的英国和法国一样，俄罗斯政府有意识地规划了其全球扩张的后期阶段。为了保护南部边境以及获取棉花这一主要产地，俄罗斯在1871年至1881年间入侵了中亚，特别是咸海以南的“丝绸之路”土耳其斯坦地区。最重要的是，俄语在这些大幅扩张的疆域内得以长期传播，得益于大量讲俄语的移民从东北部涌入新近并入俄罗斯的领土：1861年废除了将他们束缚于土地的农奴制后，在19世纪剩余的时间里，有50万人为了寻求更好的生活，向东迁徙到西伯利亚。^†

Nevertheless, there were points of similarity with the other successful empire-builders of Europe. There had been a commercial motive for the expansion eastward into Siberia, the drive of outdoorsmen to trap animals for their fur, just as the French, and later the British, were to do in the northern wilderness of Canada. The Russian Orthodox Church was for most of the last millennium a potent symbol of Russian identity,^* which accompanied the advance of Russia’s forces across south-eastern Europe and north and central Asia to the Pacific Ocean. Since its language was pointedly an antiquated form of Russia’s own, this resembles above all the imperial practice of the Church of England. And just like the British and the French in the nineteenth century, the Russian government consciously planned the later, stages of its global expansion. Central Asia, specifically the ‘Silk Road’ area of Turkestan south of the Aral Sea, was invaded in 1871-81 to protect the southern border, and as a prime source of cotton. Above all, the long-term spread of the Russian language within these vastly expanded borders was guaranteed by a flow of Russian-speaking immigrants out of the north-east into the newly Russian territories: after the 1861 abolition of the serfdom that had tied them to the land, half a million sought better fortunes eastward into Siberia in the rest of the nineteenth century.^†

俄罗斯的起源

The origins of Russian

建立俄罗斯的东斯拉夫人是维内蒂人的后裔，正如我们所见（参见第七章“Einfall：日耳曼人和斯拉夫人的扩张”，第304页），他们在公元第一个千年初期居住在波罗的海沿岸；他们中的许多人并没有南迁至巴尔干半岛并入侵希腊（参见第六章“衰落的迹象”，第257页），而是向东定居，与西北部的波罗的海部落以及东北部的乌拉尔部落（其中包括芬兰人）保持着紧张的竞争关系。事实上，有人认为罗斯的大多数原始居民是芬兰人的后裔，因此也说芬兰语。斯拉夫人在公元第二个千年的最初几个世纪里定居在他们中间。

The eastern Slavs who founded Russia were among the descendants of the Veneti who, as we have seen (see Chapter 7, ‘Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances’, p. 304), populated the shores of the Baltic in the early first millennium AD; a large number of them had not travelled southward to populate the Balkans and invade Greece (see Chapter 6, ‘Intimations of decline’, p. 257), but had rather settled towards the east, in uneasy rivalry with Baltic tribes to their north-west, and the Uralian tribes, among them the Finns, to the northeast. Indeed, the claim is made that the majority of the original population of Rus were of Finnish descent and hence language. The Slavs would have settled among them in the first centuries of the second millennium.

这些人所说的语言与西部的德国邻居以及北部的波罗的海邻居（拉脱维亚人、立陶宛人和普鲁士人）的语言相关，但语调明显柔和，辅音腭化，在 e 和 i 之前经常有塞擦音：^*因此，š、c 和 ž 音非常普遍；比较一下他们语言最古老形式的《主祷文》中间部分：

These people spoke a language that was related to that of their German neighbours to the west, and that of their Baltic neighbours (Latvians, Lithuanians and Prussians) to the north, but noticeably softer in its tone, in that consonants were palatalised and often affricated before e and i:^* as a result, the sounds š, c and ž are highly prevalent; compare the middle of the Lord’s Prayer in the oldest forms of their languages:

[注^*见下一页]

[note ^* on next page]

东斯拉夫人的语言后来演变为现代俄语、乌克兰语和白俄罗斯语，这些语言在形式上几乎可以被视为方言。他们原本是农民而非游牧民族，尽管在东部边境地区获取毛皮始终是他们的首要任务。到公元第一个千年末，他们定居在一片广袤的森林地区，这片地区从诺夫哥罗德附近的波罗的海沿岸一直向南延伸到基辅，向东则远至喀山。虽然他们说俄语，但他们的贵族阶层却由维京人（被称为瓦良格人或瓦良格人）组成。这些航海者从波罗的海沿水道入侵，起初他们可能说的是北欧语，但像许多日耳曼征服者一样，他们放弃了自己的语言。他们以越来越靠南的首都为基础，将俄罗斯人组织起来，这些首都先后设在诺夫哥罗德、斯摩棱斯克，并在882年定都基辅。德维纳河和沃尔霍夫河通过陆路通道与第聂伯河相连，从而建立了与黑海的联系，进而通往拜占庭帝国。988年，这一联系促使弗拉基米尔（意为“征服世界”）及其基辅宫廷皈依东正教。在接下来的四个世纪里，东正教传播至整个东斯拉夫人的领地。

The eastern Slavs, whose language would go on to form modern Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian, almost close enough in form to be considered dialects, had been farmers rather than nomads, although the quest for furs was always a priority on their eastern frontier. By the end of the first millennium they were established in a vast forested area which ran from the Baltic coast near Novgorod due south to Kiev, and out to the east as far as Kazan. Although the people spoke Russian, their aristocracy was made up of Vikings (known as varyági or Varangians), seafarers who had invaded along the waterways from the Baltic, and who at first would have been Norse-speaking, but like so many Germanic conquerors had given up their own language. They organised the Russians on the basis of capitals ever farther south, in Novgorod, Smolensk and, in 882, in Kiev. The Dvina and Volkhov were linked by portages with the Dnieper, and so communications were established with the Black Sea, and thence the Byzantine empire. In 988 this link resulted in the conversion of Vladímir (’conquer the world’) and his Kievan court to Orthodox Christianity. In the following four centuries, the religion spread to cover the full range of eastern Slavs.

基辅罗斯帝国的南部是广袤的草原，公元第一个千年的后半叶，这里被一系列主要讲突厥语的游牧民族所统治。这些民族骑着马，不断从东方迁徙而来，征服并定居下来，成为新的统治者：阿瓦尔人、可萨人、保加尔人、马扎尔人、佩切涅格人、钦察-波洛维察人、阿兰人，以及最终成吉思汗的蒙古人。这一时期战乱不断，这段历史被记录在现存最早的俄罗斯文学作品《伊戈尔远征记》（Slovo o Polku Igoreve）中。这部作品以1054年为背景，但显然写于12世纪。

To the south of the Kievan domain was grassy steppe, dominated in the second half of the first millennium by a series of largely Turkic-speaking nomadic peoples on horseback, who kept arriving from the east, conquering and settling down as the new masters: Avars, Khazars, Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, Kipchak-Polovtsians, Alans, and finally Genghis Khan’s Mongols. There was persistent warfare over the period, immortalised in the first surviving work of Russian literature, Slovo o Polku Igoreve, the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, set in 1054 and apparently written in the twelfth century:

Uze、knyaze、tuga umi polonila；

Se bo dva sokola slėtėsta su otnya stola zlata

poiskati grada Timutorokanya ,

a lyubo ispiti šelomomi Donu.

Uze sokoloma krilitsa pripėšali poganïxu sallyami ,

a samayu oputaša vu putinï želėznï…

Uže, knyaže, tuga umi polonila;

se bo dva sokola slėtėsta su otnya stola zlata

poiskati grada Timutorokanya,

a lyubo ispiti šelomomi Donu.

Uže sokoloma krilitsa pripėšali poganïxu sablyami,

a samayu oputaša vu putinï želėznï…

王子啊，悲痛已攫住了你的心神；

两只猎鹰已从它们父亲的黄金宝座上飞起

，去夺取特穆托罗坎城，^*

或是用头盔饮下顿河之水。

如今，猎鹰的翅膀已被异教徒的利剑剪断，

它们自身也被铁镣束缚……

O Prince, grief has now taken your mind captive;

for two falcons have flown from their father’s golden throne

to gain the city of Tmutorokan,^*

or else to drink of the Don from their helmets.

The falcons’ wings have now been clipped by the sabres of infidels,

and they themselves are fettered in fetters of iron…

最终，蒙古人以金帐汗国的名义攻陷基辅，于1240年结束了这座城市对俄罗斯人的统治。蒙古的宗主权意味着沉重的贡赋负担，这种宗主权在俄罗斯全境得到承认，甚至在1242年，位于北方的诺夫哥罗德的亚历山大·尼耶夫斯基大公^也承认这一点，尽管他此前刚刚战胜了瑞典人和条顿骑士团。人们认为，这段持续近三个世纪的早期统治，直到伊凡四世·格罗兹尼（“恐怖伊凡”）的胜利才最终结束，这段统治在俄罗斯人的灵魂深处埋下了挥之不去的悲观种子，并形成了根深蒂固的底层农奴制和顶层专制主义的传统。

At last the Mongols, constituted as the khanate of the Golden Horde, sacked Kiev and ended that city’s hegemony of the Russians in 1240. Mongol suzerainty, entailing a heavy burden in tribute, came to be recognised all over the Russian territories, even in 1242 by Prince Alexander N^yevskiy up north in Novgorod, despite his recent victories over the Swedes and the Teutonic knights. It has been reckoned that this early subjection, which lasted for almost three centuries, and was definitively ended only by the victories of Ivan IV Groznïy (’the Terrible’), planted a lasting pessimism in the Russian soul, establishing a deep-seated tradition of serfdom at the bottom of society, and absolutism at the top.

新的俄罗斯政体建立之时，其中心并非基辅，而是位于东北方向800公里（按俄罗斯计量单位，为750弗尔斯特）的莫斯科。1328年，东正教都主教据此迁都。莫斯科在罗斯境内占据着优越的中心位置，它之所以能够战胜其他城邦，部分原因在于其保持了统一，并且在14世纪幸运地每一代都只产生了一位男性继承人。1380年，莫斯科大公德米特里·顿斯科伊击败了蒙古人，1480年，伊凡三世最终废除了蒙古人的宗主权。莫斯科的王公（knyazi）地位日渐显赫：大约在同一时期，伊凡三世迎娶了拜占庭末代皇帝（1453年被废黜）的侄女索菲娅·帕莱奥洛古，并声称自己继承了皇室地位，这得益于11世纪拜占庭皇帝君士坦丁·莫诺马霍斯赠予基辅大公弗拉基米尔·莫诺马赫的一份特殊徽章。莫斯科开始被誉为“第三罗马”，15世纪末，普斯科夫的修士菲洛费致信伊凡三世：“你是全世界所有基督徒唯一的皇帝……因为两个罗马已经陷落，第三个罗马屹立不倒，而且不会有第四个。” ⁴⁴

The new Russian polity, when it came, would be based not on Kiev but on Moscow, 800 kilometres (by Russian measure, 750 vërst) to the north-east. In 1328 the Orthodox Metropolitan moved his seat accordingly. Moscow had a good central position within Rus, and its triumph over the other city-states was partly due to the fact that it stayed unified, having the luck to produce a single male heir in each generation in the fourteenth century. The Grand Prince of Moscow, Dmitriy Donskoy, defeated the Mongols in 1380, and in 1480 Ivan III finally repudiated their suzerainty. The Moscow princes (knyazi) were going up in the world: about the same time, Ivan married Sophía Palaiológou, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor (deposed in 1453), and claimed to have inherited imperial status through a special donation of insignia from Constantinos Monómakhos (Byzantine emperor) to Vladimir Monomakh (Prince of Kiev) in the eleventh century. Moscow began to be represented as the Third Rome, and the monk Filofey of Pskov wrote to Ivan III at the end of the fifteenth century: ‘Thou art the sole Emperor of all the Christians in the whole universe…For two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there shall be no fourth.’⁴⁴

1547年，伊凡四世成为历史上第一位加冕称号并非王子而是^“沙皇”（俄语发音为“凯撒”）的君主。^{*他随后征服并吞并了金帐汗国的两大残余势力——喀山汗国（1552年）和}^里海沿岸的阿斯特拉罕汗国（1556年），以此证明自己当之无愧。当地贵族被俄罗斯人同化，同化进程由此开始。通过这些举措，俄罗斯人开启了其对其他语言社群的征服之路，其语言区域的帝国式扩张持续了三个半世纪，最终在二十世纪几乎覆盖了整个亚洲大陆的北部。

In 1547, Ivan IV was the first ruler to be crowned not prince but T^sar^y, that is to say (in Russian pronunciation) Caesar.^* He went on to prove he deserved it by conquering and incorporating both the major remnants of the Golden Horde, the Turkic khanates of Kazan (in 1552) and Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea (in 1556). The local nobility were absorbed into the Russian, and so a process of assimilation was begun. With these steps, Russians began their career of imposing themselves on other language communities, an imperial expansion of their language zone which would continue for the next three and a half centuries, and end up in the twentieth century with nominal coverage of the whole northern half of the land-mass of Asia.

俄罗斯东部，然后是西部

Russian east then west

这一扩张的大部分并非沙皇、其政府或军队的主动推动。征服喀山和阿斯特拉罕的直接影响是扫清了俄罗斯向东扩张的障碍；而这一机会很快就被抓住了。斯特罗加诺夫家族恰好垄断了毛皮贸易和盐矿开采：他们从顿河地区招募了一支哥萨克军队，最初是为了抵御西伯利亚可汗，后来则是为了进攻可汗位于额尔齐斯河下游的都城。都城于1582年陷落。在接下来的五十七年里，哥萨克军队迅速而持续地推进，于1639年抵达太平洋沿岸，并于1648年建立了鄂霍次克城。他们继续沿海岸南下至黑龙江，但很快便被中国人迫使放弃了与满洲接壤的地区。 1689 年的《尼布楚条约》确定了中俄边界，这一边界在接下来的两个世纪里有效地保持不变。

The greater part of this spread came about without the active initiative of the Tsar, his government or his armies. The immediate effect of the conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan was to remove the barrier to Russian penetration out towards the east; and this opportunity was soon taken up. The Stroganov family happened to hold the monopoly of fur-trading and salt-mining: they now engaged an army of Cossacks from the Don area, initially to protect against the khan of western Siberia, but then to attack the khan’s capital on the lower Irtysh. The capital fell in 1582. Over the next fifty-seven years the Cossacks advanced rapidly and consistently, and in 1639 they reached the Pacific, founding the city of Okhotsk in 1648. They proceeded to move south down the coast to the Amur river, but were soon compelled by the Chinese to give up the area bordering Manchuria; the Sino-Russian border was defined, effectively for two centuries to come, at the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689.

尽管他们的名字源于突厥语，^但哥萨克人讲俄语。他们是一支庞大而又成分复杂的骑兵队伍，信奉基督教，桀骜不驯却又骄傲自负。在长达几个世纪的突厥游牧民族的威胁和统治下，他们选择了游牧生活，足迹遍布从波兰和乌克兰到哈萨克斯坦的南部草原地区。在横跨西伯利亚的征途中，他们在主要河流渡口修建了堡垒，其中一些如今已发展成为重要的城市（例如1604年的托木斯克、1628年的克拉斯诺亚尔斯克和1632年的雅库茨克）；但他们在所到之处却鲜有定居者。紧随其后的是一小批士兵、传教士、税吏（他们征收一种名为“亚萨克”的贡赋，以毛皮支付），以及极少数的俄罗斯定居者，这些人或是寻找土地的农民，或是政府流放的政治犯。但语言上的影响起初并不显著。俄罗斯人仍然聚集在主要河流沿岸，最初被各种古老的西伯利亚民族所环绕。在接下来的三个世纪里，随着采掘业的发展，越来越多的西方移民也加入了他们。

Although their name is Turkic,^† the Cossacks spoke Russian. They were a large but miscellaneous group of horsemen, militant Christians, disorderly but proud, who had taken up nomadic ways in the long centuries of threat and domination by Turkic nomads, and were found all over the southern steppe country from Poland and Ukraine through to Kazakhstan. During their advance across Siberia, they built fortresses at the major river crossings, some of them now major cities (among them Tomsk in 1604, Krasnoyarsk in 1628, Yakutsk in 1632); but they only scantily settled the lands through which they advanced. They were followed by a dusting of soldiers, missionaries, tax-collectors (exacting the tribute, called by the Turkic name yasak, that was paid in fur pelts) and a very few Russian settlers, either peasants looking for land, or political exiles sent by the government; but the linguistic impact was at first thin. The Russians remained congregated along the major rivers, surrounded at first by a diversity of ancient Siberian peoples. Over the next three centuries, as extractive industries began to develop, they were joined by more settlers from the west.

早期对西伯利亚的扩张，加上北欧平原上的俄罗斯核心地带，构成了如今俄罗斯的大部分领土。那里的非俄罗斯族人口一直过于稀少，而且距离任何非俄罗斯文明源头都过于遥远，不足以建立独立的国家。

This early expansion to occupy Siberia, taken together with the Russian heartland in the north European plain, accounts for most of the area that is now part of Russia. The non-Russian populations there were always too sparse, and too remote from any non-Russian source of civilisation, to organise independent states.

但俄罗斯的其他邻国则截然不同，在俄罗斯四百年的扩张历程中，它们中的大多数都沦为俄罗斯的征服对象。这些邻国大致可分为四类：西部的斯拉夫语系国家；西北部的波罗的海和乌拉尔语系国家；南部的高加索国家；以及东南部的中亚国家。恰逢二十一世纪初，在本文撰写之时，它们中的大多数已经重获独立，并正努力重建与俄罗斯统治前历史的联系；少数尚未恢复独立的国家，尤其是高加索地区的车臣人和印古什人，则正以或多或少的血腥手段寻求脱离俄罗斯。值得注意的是，俄罗斯的这些昔日殖民地中，很少有国家真正重视俄语所象征的历史纽带，或者说，如果俄语被接受为通用语，它将带来的合作潜力。值得探究的是，为什么在欧洲帝国语言中，只有俄语留下了这种相当糟糕的遗产。

This was emphatically not true of Russia’s other neighbours, most of whom found themselves succumbing to Russian conquest in the four centuries of Russia’s expansion. They fall into four groups: the Slavic-language states to the west; the Baltic and Uralic-language states to the north-west; the Caucasian states to the south; and the central Asian states to the south-east. As it happens, at the time of writing in the early twenty-first century, most of them have regained their independence, and are seeking to rebuild links with their pre-Russian pasts; the few that have not, notably the Chechens and Ingush of the Caucasus, are seeking more or less bloodily to secede. It is a notable fact about Russia’s old colonies that very few of them value highly the historic links symbolised by use of the Russian language, or indeed the potential for collaboration that Russian would give them if accepted as a lingua franca. It is worth enquiring why, alone of the European imperial languages, Russian has left this rather poisoned inheritance.

西部的斯拉夫语国家不仅包括乌克兰（Ukraína，意为“边境”）和白俄罗斯（Byelarús ^y，意为“白罗斯”），还包括波兰（Pól ^y ša，意为“开阔的平原”）。^*早期俄罗斯向这一方向的扩张最初并未扩大俄语使用者的分布范围，因为立陶宛王国利用1240年基辅陷落的机会，占领了俄罗斯西部的大部分领土。后来，在1385年，立陶宛通过联姻与波兰结成紧密联盟，两国于1569年正式结成邦联。因此，莫斯科这个新的权力中心在试图收复俄罗斯西部地区时，实际上面临着与波兰的斗争。16世纪，伊凡雷帝拿起武器进攻波兰时，他对这个西部的基督教王国的扩张远不如他对东部的鞑靼人那样成功。从1558年开始的25年利沃尼亚战争，最终导致俄罗斯失去了在波罗的海的立足点，并动摇了其君主制的根基。在随后的“混乱时期” （smútnoye vrémya），波兰入侵并于1610年至1612年间短暂占领了莫斯科。然而，1613年罗曼诺夫王朝建立后，俄罗斯恢复了秩序，来自西方的压力再次增强，莫斯科的影响力也逐渐扩大：1667年，沙皇阿列克谢·库马尔夺取了斯摩棱斯克、基辅和乌克兰东部；1772年和1793年，女皇叶卡捷琳娜二世（叶卡捷琳娜大帝）又分别征服了乌克兰和白俄罗斯的其余地区。

The Slavic-language states of the west include not just Ukraine (Ukraína, ‘On the Border’) and Belarus (Byelarús^y, ‘White Rus’), but also Poland (Pól^yša, ‘Open Plains’).^* Early Russian expansion in this direction did not at first expand the area of Russian speakers, since the kingdom of Lithuania had taken advantage of the destruction of Kiev in 1240 to take over most of the western Russian lands. Later, in 1385, Lithuania entered into a close alliance with Poland through a dynastic marriage, and the two countries were formally confederated in 1569, so in attempting to regain the western Russians, the new power centre in Moscow was actually facing a struggle with Poland. When Ivan the Terrible took up arms in the sixteenth century, he was significantly less successful in expanding against this Christian kingdom to his west than he had been against the Tatars to his east. Twenty-five years of Livonian wars from 1558 served only to lose Russia its foothold on the Baltic, and to destabilise its monarchy. In the smútnoye vrémya, the ‘confused time’, that followed, Poland invaded and briefly held Moscow from 1610 to 1612. Nevertheless, when order was restored in Russia under the new Romanov dynasty in 1613, the westward pressure was reasserted, and gradually Moscow’s sway was increased: Smolensk, Kiev and the eastern Ukraine were gained by Tsar Aleksey in 1667; and the rest of the Ukraine and Belarus by Tsaritsa Yekaterina II (Catherine the Great) in 1772 and 1793.

此时，大多数俄语使用者重新回到了俄罗斯的统治之下，这可以说是自1240年以来的第一次。然而，波兰人反抗1793年的和约，引发了战争，俄罗斯取得了决定性的胜利。结果是，几乎在1795年，俄罗斯就控制了波兰东部直至涅曼河和德涅斯特河的整个地区，这种情况一直持续到1918年第一次世界大战后欧洲重新划分版图为止。从语言学角度来看，这种控制几乎没有产生什么影响：虽然波兰语与俄语相当接近，但与乌克兰语和白俄罗斯语的亲缘关系要小得多；最重要的是，波兰人的政治和宗教历史（作为一个天主教国家）非常独特，事实上，他们的识字率和总体生活水平远远高于俄罗斯人。首先，在沙皇亚历山大一世统治时期，波兰被赋予了一部独立的宪法——但沙皇发现很难遵守宪法的条款；后来，尤其是在1863-1864年波兰起义之后，波兰政府试图推行“俄罗斯化”。其中一项措施是强制推行俄语作为官方语言；不仅华沙大学，所有波兰学校都被要求完全使用俄语授课。事实证明，这种做法行不通，波兰语最终得以保留。

At this point, most of the Russian speakers were back under a Russian government, arguably for the first time since 1240, but a rebellion by Poland against the settlement of 1793 led to war, which Russia won decisively; the result was that almost immediately, in 1795, Russia gained control of the whole east of Poland up to the Neman and Dniester rivers, a situation that prevailed until the remapping of Europe that followed the First World War in 1918. Linguistically, this control had little effect: although the Polish language is fairly closely related to Russian, it is less so than Ukrainian and Belorussian; above all, the Poles’ political and religious history (as a Catholic nation) had been quite distinct, and in fact their literacy and general standard of living far exceeded those of the Russians. To start with, under Tsar Aleksandr I the country was accorded a separate constitution—but the Tsar found it hard to respect its terms; later, especially after 1863-4 (when Poland rebelled), attempts were made at ‘Russification’. Among other measures, Russian was imposed as the language for official business; and not only the University of Warsaw but all Polish schools were required to operate exclusively in Russian. This proved unworkable, and Polish survived.

相比之下，大约在同一时期，即1863年，一项更为严苛的乌克兰语言法出台，禁止出版除民间故事、诗歌和小说以外的所有乌克兰语书籍。1867年，又进一步禁止从国外进口此类书籍；乌克兰语也被禁止用于舞台表演。这项禁令更为有效。乌克兰人被鼓励将自己视为“小俄罗斯人”——这对俄罗斯人来说正合心意，因为只有将乌克兰人归入俄罗斯人这一类别，俄罗斯人才能在帝国人口中占据多数。^*内政部长在1863年写道：“从来没有一种独立的‘小俄罗斯语’，也永远不会有。普通民众使用的方言是受到波兰语影响的俄语。” ⁴⁵ 1867年，莫斯科大学校长发出呼吁：“愿一种文学语言能够覆盖从亚得里亚海和布拉格到阿尔汉格尔斯克和太平洋沿岸的所有土地，愿所有斯拉夫民族，无论其宗教信仰如何，都采用这种语言作为与其他民族交流的工具。” ⁴⁶

By contrast, about the same time, in 1863, a Ukrainian language law was introduced, far harsher, banning publication of all books in Ukrainian besides folklore, poetry and fiction, and was followed up in 1867 by a further ban on imports of such books from abroad; Ukrainian was prohibited on the stage too. This was more effective. Ukrainians were encouraged to see themselves as ‘Little Russians’—conveniently for the Russians, since only if Ukrainians could be classed with them would Russians make up a majority of the population in the empire.^* The Minister of the Interior wrote in 1863: ‘there never has been a distinct Little Russian language, and there never will be. The dialect used by the common people is Russian contaminated by Polish influence.’⁴⁵ And in 1867 the rector of Moscow University could make the appeal: ‘May one literary language alone cover all the lands from the Adriatic Sea and Prague to Arkhangelsk and the Pacific Ocean, and may every Slav nation irrespective of its religion adopt this language as a means of communication with the others.’⁴⁶

乌克兰语作为一种语言，拥有自己的文化，在苏联境内拥有自己的共和国，并在1990年成为独立的国家，其独特的身份很大程度上归功于这些权力并未越过边界延伸至加利西亚。加利西亚是位于现代利沃夫以南的一块乌克兰语飞地，它不知何故一直处于奥匈帝国的统治之下，游离于俄罗斯之外。这里居住着20%的乌克兰人口。在那里，乌克兰语的拼写和表达方式得以在印刷品上自由发展，不受任何阻碍，时刻提醒着所有乌克兰人他们本应拥有怎样的身份。斯大林于1945年结束了该地区的独立，但这并未产生长远的影响。加利西亚后来成为20世纪80年代乌克兰民族主义运动的中心，也是乌克兰最终脱离苏联的关键所在。 ⁴⁷

The separate identity of Ukrainian as a language with its own culture, its own republic within the Soviet Union and indeed, as of 1990, its own state owed much to the fact that these writs did not run over the border into Galicia, a Ukrainian-speaking enclave (south of modern Lvov) that had somehow remained outside Russia, inside the Austro-Hungarian empire. It contained 20 per cent of all Ukrainians. There Ukrainian spelling and Ukrainian expressions could flourish, without hindrance, on the printed page, to remind all Ukrainians of what they might be. Stalin ended the region’s independence in 1945, but to no long-term effect. Galicia went on to become the centre of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 1980s, the key to Ukraine’s secession from the Soviet Union.⁴⁷

俄罗斯北部，然后是南部

Russian north then south

在西北部，俄罗斯还控制了主要的波罗的海语系和乌拉尔语系地区。东北部的乌拉尔语系地区，主要是卡累利阿，至少自1472年莫斯科征服北方的诺夫哥罗德帝国以来，一直是俄罗斯人的狩猎场。这里的人民是土著居民，他们与俄罗斯人的接触虽然比其他西伯利亚人早一个世纪，但本质上是相同的。从根本上说，他们被忽视了。

In the north-west, Russia also managed to gain control of the principal Baltic-and Uralic-language areas. The Uralic areas of the north-east, mainly Karelia, had been hunting grounds of the Russians at least since Moscow had conquered the northern empire of Novgorod in 1472. The people here were indigenous, and their contact with the Russians, though started a century earlier than the other Siberians’, is essentially of the same type. Fundamentally they were ignored.

爱沙尼亚和利沃尼亚的并入时间较晚，它们从十三、十四世纪占领它们的德国殖民者那里继承了相当多的欧洲经验；1721年，伟大的俄国现代化沙皇彼得一世（“彼得大帝”）从瑞典手中夺取了这两个国家，这是他为确保俄罗斯获得波罗的海安全通道而长期努力的一部分。更南边的立陶宛和拉脱维亚以及波兰于1795年被俄罗斯吞并；更北边的芬兰则在1809年被亚历山大一世吞并，此前他刚刚在另一场对瑞典的战争中取得了胜利，并以对芬兰人相当有利的条件将其纳入俄罗斯版图。

Estonia and Livonia came only much later, and brought with them a fair amount of European experience from the German colonists who had occupied them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; they were wrested from Swedish control by the great Russian moderniser Tsar Pëtr I (’Peter the Great’) in 1721 as part of his long-standing campaign to find Russia secure access to the Baltic. Farther south, Lithuania and Latvia were gained along with Poland in 1795; and farther north, Finland was incorporated in 1809 by Aleksandr I, on terms rather favourable to the Finns, after another successful war against Sweden.

在这些地区中，俄罗斯移民和俄语的渗透主要集中在波罗的海地区，尤其是爱沙尼亚和拉脱维亚。然而，令人意外的是，德语的影响在这里依然非常强大；事实上，德语骑士团（Ritterschaften）的传统权力结构一直作为政府的中间层级存在到1917年革命，这充分体现了德语骑士对沙皇的忠诚。但这种对非俄罗斯势力的容忍在19世纪末开始减弱：19世纪80年代，俄语被引入行政和司法系统，俄语学校也得到鼓励，并试图将俄语作为除入门级以外的所有课程的必修课。1893年，位于塔尔图的多尔帕特大学被改建为尤里耶夫大学，成为一所严格的俄语院校。但到了1899年，下一任沙皇尼古拉二世在芬兰推行类似的语言政策时，芬兰民众普遍抵制俄罗斯机构，1904年俄罗斯总督遇刺身亡。由于当时俄罗斯正与日本交战，为了稳妥起见，俄罗斯人恢复了芬兰人使用本国语言的自由，这项权利在俄罗斯人自己颁布的宪法中得到了保障。

Among these areas, the penetration of Russian immigrants, and of the Russian language, was only significant in the Baltic areas, especially Estonia and Latvia. But here, perversely, the German influence remained very strong; indeed, the traditional power structure of German-speaking Ritterschaften, ‘knighthoods’, persisted as an intermediate level of government until the revolution in 1917, so loyal were the German Ritter to the Tsar. But the toleration of this un-Russian hold-out did begin to wane in the late nineteenth century: Russian was introduced in administration and the courts in the 1880s, and Russian-language schools were encouraged, with an attempt to make the language compulsory at all but the introductory level. In 1893 Dorpat University, in Tartu, was converted into Yuriev, a strictly Russian-language institution. But when in 1899 the next Tsar, Nikolay II, tried similar language measures in Finland, there was a general boycott of Russian institutions, and in 1904 the Russian governor-general was assassinated. Since Russia was at war with Japan at the time, the Russians chose to play it safe, and restored the Finns’ liberty to use their own language, as guaranteed in the constitution that the Russians themselves had given them.

俄罗斯人占领波罗的海地区的根本动力在于其对贸易通道的需求。这一动机也促成了俄罗斯南下扩张的开端，但这很难被简单地视为俄罗斯的赤裸裸的侵略，因为自16世纪以来，最后一个突厥汗国——克里米亚鞑靼人——就不断侵扰俄罗斯领土。17世纪，俄罗斯实力不断增强，他们感到可以有所作为；然而，在又经过一个世纪的镇压鞑靼人的尝试后，直到1783年，叶卡捷琳娜大帝才最终击败并摧毁了鞑靼汗国。1792年，她得以在黑海沿岸建立俄罗斯的主要不冻港——敖德萨。敖德萨很快成为高度俄罗斯化的地区，俄罗斯人持续涌入，而鞑靼人也大规模迁徙。大多数鞑靼人向西或向南迁徙至奥斯曼帝国，当时奥斯曼帝国仍然环绕着黑海沿岸的大部分地区^。

The drive behind the Russians’ takeover of the Baltic regions had been their need for access to trade. This motive also played a part in the beginnings of Russia’s push south, but this could hardly be represented as naked Russian aggression, since raids into their territory from the last of the Turkic khanates, the Crimean Tatars, had been persistent since the sixteenth century. Russian strength grew in the seventeenth century, until they felt that something could be done; but it was only after a further century of attempts to put down the Tatars that in 1783 Catherine the Great at last defeated and destroyed their state. In 1792, she was then able to found Russia’s principal warm-water port, Odessa on the Black Sea. This soon became a highly Russianised area, with continuing Russian immigration, and Tatar emigration, on a massive scale. Most of the Tatars went west and south into the Ottoman empire, which still surrounded most of the Black Sea coast.^*

但在俄罗斯帝国向南扩张的过程中，俄语的这种程度的渗透实属罕见。俄语向这一方向传播的主要原因，却是一个颇为奇特的现象：俄罗斯与格鲁吉亚结盟。

But in the spread of Russia’s empire southward, this degree of Russian-language penetration was exceptional. The major reason for the extension of Russian in this direction was the rather curious one of an alliance with Georgia.

高加索山脉以南，格鲁吉亚和亚美尼亚这两个基督教民族，各自拥有鲜明的语言特征，与南部的奥斯曼帝国和波斯帝国形成鲜明对比。叶卡捷琳娜大帝在征服克里米亚鞑靼人的同一年，说服了格鲁吉亚东部卡塔利纳-卡赫季亚公国的国王伊拉克利签订了《格奥尔基耶夫斯克条约》。根据该条约，俄罗斯将保证格鲁吉亚免受其（穆斯林）敌人的侵略，以换取对格鲁吉亚外交政策的控制权。格鲁吉亚被视为南部穆斯林世界边缘的一道重要缓冲地带。叶卡捷琳娜于1796年去世，但她及其继任者对条约的解读极其片面：他们没有在1795年援助格鲁吉亚人抵抗波斯入侵，反而从1801年到1806年间，先是吞并了卡塔利娜-卡赫季亚，随后又吞并了所有其他格鲁吉亚公国，将它们统一起来，从而增强了它们的实力，但这一切都是以俄罗斯的一个省份的形式进行的。他们还对波斯发动战争，于1805年吞并了邻近的（突厥语系）阿塞拜疆地区。亚美尼亚人也一度成为俄罗斯帝国的积极成员，尤其是在俄罗斯击败波斯和奥斯曼帝国之后，俄罗斯吞并了亚美尼亚的埃里温省（1828年），并在1829年短暂占领了安纳托利亚的东北部地区。这导致大量亚美尼亚人涌入高加索地区的各个角落，尤其是阿塞拜疆的纳戈尔诺-卡拉巴赫地区。

South of the Caucasus mountains, the two Christian peoples of Georgia and Armenia, each quite clearly marked out by their unique languages, confronted Muslim empires to their south: the Ottomans and the Persians. Catherine the Great, in the same year in which she overcame the Crimean Tatars, prevailed on King Irakli of the eastern Georgian principality of Kartalina-Kakhetia to enter into the Treaty of Georgievsk, whereby Russia would guarantee Georgia’s integrity against its (Muslim) enemies, in return for control of its foreign policy. Georgia was seen as a useful buffer on the edge of the Muslim south. Catherine died in 1796, but she and her successors interpreted the treaty in an extremely one-sided way: they did not aid the Georgians against the Persian invasion in 1795, but from 1801 to 1806 they proceeded to annex first Kartalina-Kakhetia, and then all the other Georgian principalities, uniting and so strengthening them, but as a Russian province. They also made war on Persia itself, taking in the neighbouring (Turkic-speaking) territory of Azerbaijan in 1805. Armenians too for a time became enthusiastic members of the Russian empire, especially when Russia defeated both the Persians and the Ottomans, incorporating the Armenian province of Yerevan (1828) and briefly occupying the north-eastern quarter of Anatolia (1829). This guaranteed a massive influx of Armenians into all parts of the Caucasus, but especially the Nagorno-Karabagh area of Azerbaijan.

这些干预行动在战略上或许显得欠妥，因为高加索山脉是俄罗斯草原为数不多的天然屏障之一。如今，俄罗斯却无端地将领土拱手让给山脉之外的势力。然而，习惯于守卫无垠平原的俄罗斯战略家们似乎只乐于奉行积极进取的政策。罗斯季斯拉夫·法捷耶夫将军在1860年评论道：“如果俄罗斯的疆界止于高加索山脉的雪峰，那么整个亚洲大陆的西部都将不在我们的势力范围之内，而且鉴于土耳其和波斯目前的无能，它很快就会迎来新的主人。” ⁴⁸

These interventions may seem to have been strategically ill advised, since the Caucasus range was one of the few natural borders that the Russian steppes possessed. Now Russia was gratuitously offering hostages to fortune beyond it. But Russian strategists, used to defending boundless plains, seem to have been happy only with a forward policy. General Rostislav Fadeyev commented in 1860: ‘If Russia’s horizons ended on the snowy summits of the Caucasus range, then the whole western half of the Asian continent would be outside our sphere of influence and, given the present impotence of Turkey and Persia, would not long wait for another master.’⁴⁸

这些外高加索省份的代价是长达六十年的高加索战争，这也是法捷耶夫将军著作的书名。为了确保通往基督教南方的通道，俄罗斯必须征服整个高加索山脉。这场战争尤其残酷，因为它带有浓厚的宗教色彩：几乎整个地区过去是（现在仍然是）穆斯林。征服最终实现，但代价极其惨烈，而如今车臣的冲突表明，150年后，许多怨恨依然未消。

The price of these trans-Caucasian provinces was the ‘sixty years of Caucasian wars’, which was the title of General Fadeyev’s book. What was required was nothing less than the Russian conquest of the whole mountain range, simply in order to assure their access to the Christian south. The fighting was particularly bitter for having a religious edge: almost the whole area was (and has remained) Muslim. The conquest was achieved, but only through immense brutality, and the current struggles in Chechnya show that many resentments are still unassuaged 150 years later.

在这些省份，俄语成为行政和教育的官方语言——当然，教会和清真寺并非如此。但总的来说，它并没有取代当地的本土语言，而该地区是世界上语言最多样化的地区之一。无论是北部山区的居民，还是南部受过高等教育、文化底蕴深厚的格鲁吉亚人和亚美尼亚人，情况都是如此。阿塞拜疆人也发展出了自己的文学语言。俄罗斯政府，尤其是在19世纪后期，曾多次试图让民众更加俄罗斯化，例如在1885年关闭亚美尼亚教区学校，代之以俄语学校，但后来又撤销了这项命令，这些举措并未赢得多少民心。如今，格鲁吉亚、亚美尼亚和阿塞拜疆在两个世纪后都已成为独立国家，我们可以看到，俄语的普及率（以母语使用者的百分比衡量）仍然很低。亚美尼亚2%；格鲁吉亚7%；阿塞拜疆6%。 ⁴⁹

Russian became the language of administration and education in all these provinces—not of course of the Church or of the mosque. But in general it did not supplant the native languages of the region, which is one of the most linguistically diverse in the world. This was as true of the mountain peoples of the north as of the hyper-educated and cultivated Georgians and Armenians of the south. In their society, the Azeris too developed a literary language of their own. The Russian government, especially in the late nineteenth century, won few friends with its sporadic attempts to make the population more Russian, for example closing Armenian parish schools and replacing them with Russian schools in 1885, but then rescinding the order. Now that Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, after two centuries, have become independent nations, it can be seen that the penetration of Russian (measured by percentage of first-language speakers) remained very low. Armenia 2 per cent; Georgia 7 per cent; Azerbaijan 6 per cent.⁴⁹

俄罗斯向穆斯林聚居的中亚扩张的故事可以简述，因为此时的俄罗斯已与欧洲其他列强如出一辙，都渴望在其“势力范围”内尽可能地加强控制。这片广袤的地区历来以穆斯林为主，似乎与帝国的其他任何地区都截然不同，地位也更为疏远：俄罗斯人称其居民为“ inoródt ^sï ”，意为“异乡人”。对哈萨克斯坦草原的征服始于18世纪末叶卡捷琳娜大帝时期，并于1848年完成：这片土地^由此向移民敞开大门，其模式与当时正在被殖民的美国西部颇为相似。

The story of Russia’s expansion into Muslim central Asia can be briefly told, since by this time Russia had cast itself very much in the same mould as the other great powers of Europe, anxious to guarantee as high a degree of control as possible within their ‘spheres of influence’. This vast area, which was always predominantly Muslim, seemed to have a different, more distant status than any other part of the empire: the Russians called its inhabitants inoródt^sï, ‘aliens’. The conquest of the steppe-land of Kazakhstan,^* begun under Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century, was completed in 1848: it was thus opened up to settlers, rather on the same model as the American West that was being colonised at the same time.

原则上，语言（和宗教）宽容是俄罗斯人对待帝国这一地区的一个特点。无论鞑靼人接受基督教信仰（1803年已有鞑靼语版的《圣经》和教义问答）还是继续信奉伊斯兰教，鞑靼语（即察合台突厥语）都被指定为草原地区的行政语言。在与穆斯林游牧民族打交道时，俄罗斯人必须牢记，他们始终可以选择越过边境，或者更令人担忧的是，他们可能成为奥斯曼帝国的第五纵队。因此，总的来说，俄罗斯人努力为他们提供一个有吸引力的选择，以换取他们接受俄罗斯的统治。1773年，叶卡捷琳娜二世颁布的《神圣宗教会议法令》在俄罗斯设立了穆斯林宗教机构——穆夫提亚。她还颁布法令，允许逊尼派穆斯林在前往麦加朝圣途中避开什叶派伊朗，享有过境权。她甚至资助在布哈拉建立了一所穆斯林宗教学校——伊斯兰学校（madrasa）。穆斯林进入俄罗斯军事院校学习，拥有自己的（志愿）团，甚至在普通的俄罗斯部队中担任军官——这与当时英国或法国帝国的做法截然不同^。50

In principle, linguistic (and religious) toleration was a feature of the Russians’ approach to this part of the empire. Whether the Tatars accepted the Christian faith (the Bible and catechism were available in Tatar in 1803) or remained with Islam, Tatar (i.e. Chagatay Turkic) was authorised as the administrative language for the steppes. In dealing with Muslim nomads, the Russians had to keep in mind that they always had the option of decamping over the border, or, more worryingly, that they might become a fifth column for the Ottomans. In general, therefore, they endeavoured to offer them an attractive option if they accepted Russian rule. Catherine II’s Holy Synod Act of 1773 established a religious directorate for Muslims in Russia, the muftiyya. She also decreed transit rights for Sunni Muslims who wanted to avoid Shia Iran on their pilgrimages to Mecca. And she even financed a Muslim religious school, a madrasa, in Bukhara. Muslims attended Russia’s military academies, had their own (volunteer) regiments, and even served as officers in ordinary Russian regiments—something very different from the contemporary practice of the British or French empires.⁵⁰

尽管如此，草原地区实际上已经俄罗斯化了。真正改变语言格局的是欧洲移民的涌入：1887年为20%，1911年为40%，1939年为47%。 ⁵¹ 20世纪50年代赫鲁晓夫的“处女地”政策又增加了150万移民。（根据2000年《民族语》的数据，哈萨克斯坦的俄语母语人口现为623万，占总人口的38%。）⁵²

But for all this, the steppes did become effectively Russified. It was the incidence of European settlers which really changed the linguistic picture: 20 per cent in 1887, 40 per cent in 1911, 47 per cent in 1939.⁵¹ Khrushchev’s ‘Virgin Lands’ Policy of the 1950s added a further 1.5 million. (The number of native Russian speakers in Kazakhstan according to the 2000 Ethnologue is now 6.23 million, 38 per cent.)⁵²

1854年，俄国在克里米亚被其帝国同盟——英国、法国和奥斯曼帝国击败。或许是为了寻求些许慰藉，俄国随即转而征服中亚，即哈萨克草原以南的地区。正如陀思妥耶夫斯基开篇引言所示，与缺乏现代武器的土著居民进行殖民战争要容易得多，而且在某种程度上也令欧洲人感到振奋。

In 1854, Russia was defeated in the Crimea by its imperial peers, Britain, France and the Ottomans. Perhaps seeking some consolation, Russia immediately proceeded to the conquest of central Asia, due south of the Kazakh steppes. Colonial wars against natives without modern weapons were far easier to win, and somehow heartening for Europeans, as the opening quote from Dosteyevsky shows us.

该地区的主要残余势力是希瓦、布哈拉和浩罕三个酋长国。尽管入侵者在技术上优于当地居民，但战争持续了二十二年，最终于1876年结束。东部的浩罕被吞并，而另外两个酋长国——曾包含传奇城市撒马尔罕的布哈拉和里海沿岸的希瓦——则基本上沦为附庸国。“突厥斯坦”作为一个省级行政区划被设立，用来容纳这些新征服的领土。俄罗斯的主要关注点在于发展费尔干纳盆地的集约化棉花种植，这吸引了大量移民涌入该地区，也就是今天的乌兹别克斯坦的一部分。然而，这些地区的定居水平从未达到与北部草原地区相媲美的程度：对应的四个现代国家（从西到东）分别是土库曼斯坦、乌兹别克斯坦、塔吉克斯坦和吉尔吉斯斯坦，它们3900万人口中只有9%是俄语母语者^。53

The principal remaining powers in this area were the emirates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand. Despite the technical advantages of the incomers over the residents, the war took twenty-two years, and ended in 1876. Kokand, in the east, was annexed, but the other two emirates, Bukhara, which had contained the legendary Samarkand, and Khiva on the Caspian shore, were largely left as dependent powers. ‘Turkestan’ was created as a provincial envelope to hold these new acquisitions. Russia’s main concern came to be the development of intensive cotton cultivation in the Ferghana valley, and this attracted large numbers of settlers into the area, which is part of modern Uzbekistan. Nevertheless, settlement in these areas never reached levels comparable to those of the steppes to the north: the four corresponding modern states are (from west to east) Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and their population of 39 million embraces only 9 per cent native Russian speakers.⁵³

俄罗斯的地位

The status of Russian

至此，我们对沙皇帝国如何传播俄语的简要回顾就结束了。接下来需要思考的是，为什么俄语从未成为一种具有威望的语言：为什么它不像其他远离欧洲的帝国语言那样，成为被征服民族渴望融入西方化、全球化未来的象征？所有十九世纪的欧洲帝国如今都已解体，但它们的语言仍在世界各地使用。为什么在当今十大语言中，只有俄语会在二十一世纪面临使用者减少的困境？

This completes our brief review of how Russian was spread by the Tsar’s empire. It remains to consider why it never became a prestige language: why, unlike all the other imperial European languages that established themselves far from Europe, it did not come to symbolise the conquered peoples’ aspirations to take part in a Westernised, globalised future. All the nineteenth-century European empires are now dissolved: but their languages are still used worldwide. Why is Russian, alone of the current top ten languages, set to lose speakers in the twenty-first century?

俄罗斯帝国的四大机构对俄语在东北欧本土以外的传播至关重要。它们分别是东正教、军队、国家官僚机构和受过教育的精英阶层——在俄语中通常被称为知识分子。所有这些机构至今仍以某种形式存在，但在21世纪初，它们似乎都不太可能继续保持活力，无论是作为主导力量还是作为全球灵感的源泉。

Four major institutions of the Russian empire had been crucial to the spread of Russian beyond its homeland in north-eastern Europe. They were the Orthodox Church, the army, the state bureaucracy and the educated elite—usually known in Russian as the intelligentsia. All these still exist in some form, but none of them, in the early twenty-first century, seem likely to remain lively, either as dominant forces or as sources of inspiration worldwide.

教会很早就将自身与当地语言联系起来，这种语言现在通常被称为古教会斯拉夫语，但教会始终认为自己是俄语，只是表达方式较为虔诚。即使在重大的礼仪改革时期，一位旧礼仪的拥护者也会写信给沙皇：“用纯正的俄语说‘主啊，怜悯我’。把那些‘求主垂怜’留给希腊人吧：那是他们的语言，去他们的！你是俄罗斯人，阿列克谢，不是希腊人。说你的母语，不要为此感到羞耻，无论是在教堂还是在家里！” ⁵⁴教会独特的圆顶建筑耸立在茅屋之间，成为俄罗斯领土在西伯利亚扩张时最显著的标志；只要有沙皇存在，教会就赋予了沙皇统治合法性。直到十八世纪，教会学校一直是俄罗斯识字教育的主要来源。但自1721年彼得大帝的“圣主教公会”改革以来，教会就再也没有恢复元气。彼得大帝自封为教会的最高保护者，废除了教会内部从教区到基层的民主制度，实际上将教会变成了国家机器的一部分。因此，沙皇和教会虽然相互扶持，却与俄罗斯社会的基层彻底脱节。他们越来越无力承担任何民众参与的风险。语言领域的一个典型例子是，在1812年拿破仑入侵之后，改革派沙皇亚历山大一世支持成立一个帝国俄罗斯圣经公会，作为英国和外国圣经公会的分支机构：他们计划开展一项多语种出版计划，但该计划最终因提议用“简明俄语” （prostóye naryéciye ）发行圣经而失败。福音派人士被描绘成“隐形拿破仑”的代理人，破坏了人们对上帝圣言应有的尊重。1821年，俄罗斯圣经在圣主教公会的命令下被焚毁。^*

The Church had early attached itself to its local language, now usually known as Old Church Slavonic, but always felt to be Russian in an appropriately reverent version. Even in the midst of major liturgical reforms, an advocate of the old ways could write to the Tsar: ‘Say in good Russian “Lord have mercy on me”. Leave all those Kyrie Eleisons to the Greeks: that’s their language, spit on them! You are Russian, Alexey, not Greek. Speak your mother tongue and be not ashamed of it, either in church or at home!’⁵⁴ Its distinctive domes rising among the huts provided the most recognisable signs of Russia as its domain spread out across Siberia; as long as there were Tsars, it legitimated them. Church schools were the main source of Russian literacy well into the eighteenth century. But it never recovered from the ‘Holy Synod’ reforms of Peter the Great in 1721, when he made himself supreme protector of the Church, abolishing its internal democracy from the parishes up, and so effectively making it into an arm of the state. Thereby both Tsar and Church, although mutually supportive, became quite cut off from the grass roots of Russian society. They became increasingly unable to take the risks of any popular involvement. A telling example came in the linguistic sphere when, in the aftermath of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion, the reforming Tsar Alexander I favoured the establishment of an Imperial Russian Bible Society, as a branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society: a multilingual publishing initiative was planned, but the project came unstuck on the proposal to distribute the Bible in prostóye naryéciye, ‘simple diction’, i.e. plain Russian. The evangelicals were cast as agents of ‘the Invisible Napoleon’, undermining the respect due to the word of God, and in 1821 the Russian Bibles were burnt on the orders of the Holy Synod.^*

另一个因其性质而广泛传播俄语的机构是军队。与其他帝国竞争对手相比，这支军队因其民族和语言的统一性而独树一帜。1762-1763年的军事委员会认为，“军队的力量最根本在于拥有共同的语言、宗教、习俗和血统”；一个世纪后，俄罗斯军事评论家在评论1859年和1866年的战争时，强调了其军队的纯粹俄罗斯性，并将其与奥地利军队的种族和语言大杂烩形成鲜明对比：当时，90%的士兵来自俄罗斯本土、白俄罗斯和乌克兰地区，而且大多数穆斯林免服兵役。 ⁵⁵然而，在某种程度上，军队的民族纯粹性削弱了其单一语言的影响：如果更多非俄罗斯人被迫入伍，他们中的更多人就不得不学习俄语。事实上，服役二十五年或更久的俄罗斯老兵几乎没有机会重返平民生活。他们通常最终会留在城镇，从事马车夫、家仆或教师等工作。 ⁵⁶因此，与古罗马的退伍老兵相比，他们传播本族语言的能力要弱得多。

Another institution which by its nature spread the use of Russian far and wide was the army. This was distinctive among its imperial competitors for its ethnic and linguistic unity. For the Military Commission of 1762-3, ‘the strength of the Army consists in, most basic of all, the existence of common language, religion, customs and blood’; a century later, Russian military commentators on the wars of 1859 and 1866 stressed the pure Russianness of their army in contrast with the Austrians’ ragbag of races and languages: at the time, 90 per cent of the soldiers were from the homeland area of Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, and most Muslims were exempt from military service.⁵⁵ In a way, though, the ethnic purity of the force diminished the effect of its single language: if more non-Russians had been obliged to join up, more of them would have had to learn Russian. In fact, though, there was little scope for Russian veterans, having served for twenty-five years or more, to return to civil life after their service. They would typically end up in towns, as coachmen, domestic servants or schoolteachers.⁵⁶ In this way, they were less able to seed the spread of their language than, say, the retired soldiers of ancient Rome.

沙皇政府的可见部门——官僚机构——自然无处不在。但它在传播俄语话语方面的影响力却远低于预期。自彼得大帝认识到波罗的海地区德语使用者在推行其改革方面具有特殊潜力以来，官僚机构的高层人员中，来自波罗的海地区的德语使用者比例就异常高（在十八、十九世纪高达20%）。 ⁵⁷而官僚机构职能范围有限，主要仅限于征收人头税和征兵，这必然限制了它在社会中的作用和互动。

The bureaucracy, the visible arm of the Tsar’s government, was of course everywhere. But its influence in terms of spreading Russian discourse was less than might have been expected. Its higher levels were disproportionately (up to 20 per cent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) full of German speakers from the Baltic, ever since Peter the Great had recognised their special potential to carry through his reforms.⁵⁷ And the minimal scope of its functions, mainly the gathering of poll tax and the recruitment of troops, must have limited its role and interaction in society.

最后，还有知识分子阶层。从某种意义上说，正是这个群体几乎凭借一己之力，凭借他们在十八、十九世纪取得的文学成就，将俄罗斯推上了世界文化版图。彼得大帝点燃了这股浪潮，他推行的改革旨在建立一个世俗化的俄罗斯，其灵感来源于他访问英国，尤其是德国的经历。米哈伊尔·罗蒙诺索夫（1711-1775）是这一时期最伟大的学者，他出身于阿尔汉格尔斯克一个渔民家庭，却凭借自身努力脱颖而出。他将化学和语言学的专长融会贯通，开始着手定义一种新的俄语文学语言，这种语言将外来词汇和口语融入到从教会斯拉夫语继承而来的略显沉闷的风格之中。1783年，以法兰西学院为蓝本的俄罗斯科学院成立。它在1789年至1794年间编纂了一部重要的词典，并于1802年出版了一部俄语语法。尽管正如我们在考察法语历史时所看到的，外国影响在俄罗斯精英阶层的社会生活中仍然根深蒂固，但新一代受过教育的俄罗斯作家们勇于迎接新语言的挑战，其中包括普希金、果戈理、托尔斯泰、陀思妥耶夫斯基和屠格涅夫，这里仅列举其中最著名的几位。他们认真对待定义俄罗斯文学能够为俄罗斯乃至世界带来什么的这项任务。最著名的例子是，在1880年纪念普希金的活动中，屠格涅夫和陀思妥耶夫斯基都表达了他们对普希金的看法：屠格涅夫说，普希金是为受过教育的“民族”（nátiya，即通过彼得大帝改革而形成的民族）而写的，但俄罗斯的“人民”（naród，即民众）将通过阅读他的作品而觉醒；陀思妥耶夫斯基反驳说，普希金的作品具有内在的——也是独一无二的——普世价值，这赋予了俄罗斯巨大的优势：“成为一个真正的俄罗斯人意味着尝试调和欧洲的矛盾，并在包容一切的俄罗斯人精神中抚慰欧洲的痛苦。” ⁵⁸

Finally, there was the intelligentsia. In a sense, it was this group almost alone which put Russian on the global cultural map, with the literary efflorescence that they achieved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peter the Great sparked it off, with his reforms aimed at creating a secular Russia, inspired by what he had encountered in his visits to Britain and above all Germany. Mikhail Lomonósov (1711-75), the greatest scholar of this era—who had somehow managed to promote himself out of an Archangel fisherman’s family—combined expertise in chemistry and linguistics, and started the task of defining a Russian literary language, one that would incorporate foreign borrowings and colloquial speech into the rather ponderous style inherited from Church Slavonic. A Russian Academy, modelled on the Académie Française, was established in 1783; it compiled a major dictionary in 1789-94, and defined a Russian grammar that was published in 1802. Although, as we have seen in considering the history of French, foreign influence remained strong in the Russian elite’s social life, the newly educated generations of Russian authors rose to the challenge of their new language, and included Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, to name only the most famous. They took seriously the task of defining what Russian literature could do for Russia and the world. Most famously, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky both projected their ideas back to Pushkin at the celebrations in his memory in 1880: Turgenev said that Pushkin spoke to the educated nátiya, the nation that had come about through Peter’s reforms, but that the Russian naród, the people, would come to awareness through learning to read him; Dostoyevsky countered that Pushkin was intrinsically—and uniquely—universal in his appeal, something that gave Russia an immense advantage: ‘To become a genuine Russian means to attempt to bring reconciliation to the contradictions of Europe and to offer relief for Europe’s anguish in the all-human and all-embracing Russian soul.’⁵⁸

令人惊讶的是，俄罗斯作家确实成功地在欧洲各地拥有了读者，尽管他们不可避免地更多地受到屠格涅夫笔下的民族主义者（nátii）的影响，而非陀思妥耶夫斯基笔下的民粹主义者（naródï）。然而，由于俄罗斯国内知识分子群体非常狭窄，几乎与绝大多数公众隔绝，他们在国内实现其宏大抱负的愿望受到了限制。19世纪80年代初，俄罗斯人口的识字率仍然不到10%，尽管此后迅速上升，到世纪末，50岁以下人口的识字率接近30%。 ⁵⁹当然，那些识字的人也并非都追求高雅艺术，他们更喜欢冒险故事、爱情小说和星座运势。 ⁶⁰

Amazingly, Russian writers did succeed in reaching an audience all over Europe, though inevitably more among Turgenev’s nátii than Dostoyevsky’s naródï. But the realisation of their cosmic aspirations at home was limited by the very narrow base of the intelligentsia within Russia itself, almost cut off from the vast majority of their public. General literacy of the Russian population was still not above 10 per cent in the early 1880s, although it rose rapidly thereafter, approaching 30 per cent among the under-fifties by the end of the century.⁵⁹ And of course, those who could read did not all have a taste for the highest, preferring adventure stories, romances and horoscopes.⁶⁰

但俄国知识分子从未尝试在其理想中为那些被沙皇军队耗费了漫长而血腥的战争才纳入其统治的亚洲民众留出一席之地。从伊凡雷帝征服喀山到十九世纪初的征服，外国贵族在其领土被征服后，总是被承认并被赋予财产权；但从未有人积极努力地在文化上接纳他们。偶尔，一些来自本国传统、接受过西方教育的知识分子会尝试寻求一种融合。克里米亚鞑靼教育家伊斯梅尔·贝·加斯皮拉利（后改名为加斯普林斯基）就是最好的例子。他最初在乡村的伊斯兰学校（经学院）接受教育，之后前往圣彼得堡学习俄语，又前往巴黎学习法语。接下来，他在伊斯坦布尔待了四年（1871-1875），之后返回克里米亚，坚信俄罗斯穆斯林必须通过俄罗斯的方式走向现代化。他撰写了第一部重要著作《俄罗斯的伊斯兰教》（ Russkoye Musulmanstvo），并长期编辑一份名为《译者》（ Tercüman-Perevodcik，鞑靼语和俄语合称）的期刊。加斯皮拉利的和平观点最初并未被克里米亚鞑靼社群轻易接受，但到1905年，他的团体已成功创办了350多所俄语和鞑靼语双语学校。更耐人寻味的是俄罗斯方面的反应：当局非但没有鼓励这位潜在盟友搭建桥梁，反而拒绝允许加斯皮拉利召开全穆斯林大会。相反，他们致力于削弱非俄罗斯人（以及工人和农民）的政治参与，并在1907年提出了一项第二届杜马（“议会”）选举法，其序言为：“为加强俄罗斯国家而设立的国家杜马，其精神也必须是俄罗斯的。” 加斯皮拉利未能取得进一步进展^。61

But the Russian intelligentsia made no attempt at all to make a place within their ideals for the Asian multitudes that their armed forces had exerted themselves so long, and so bloodily, to bring within the Tsar’s domains. From Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Kazan to the conquests of the early nineteenth century, foreign nobility had always been recognised, and accorded property rights within the Russian system, when their own territories had been subdued; no effort had ever been made actively to involve them culturally. Occasionally, intellectuals from their own traditions who managed to get a Western education would try to devise an accommodation. The best example of this is the Crimean Tatar educationist Ismail Bey Gaspirali (who adopted the name Gasprinsky). Educated first in a village madrasa (Islamic religious school), he went to St Petersburg to learn Russian, and Paris to learn French. Next spending four years in Istanbul (1871-5), he returned to Crimea with the conviction that Russia’s Muslims must approach modernity through Russian, writing his first important book, Russkoye Musulmanstvo (’Russian Islam’), and long editing a journal, Tercüman-Perevodcik (’Interpreter’ in Tatar and Russian). Gaspirali’s peaceable views were not easily accepted in the Crimean Tatar community, but by 1905 his group had succeeded in founding over 350 schools, bilingual in Russian and Tatar. More revealing was the reaction from the Russians: rather than encourage this bridge-building from a potential ally, the authorities refused to allow Gaspirali to convene an all-Muslim congress; rather they worked to diminish the political participation of non-Russians (as well as workers and peasants), proposing an electoral law for the second Duma (’Parliament’) in 1907 with the preamble: ‘The State Duma, created to strengthen the Russian state, must be Russian also in spirit.’ Gaspirali made no more progress.⁶¹

俄罗斯始终最缺乏的，莫过于一个资产阶级，一个拥有独立地位和经济来源的商人和专业人士阶层，这个阶层本可以作为统治阶级与土地劳动者之间的纽带，促进社会流动和收入流动。在革命前的时代，俄罗斯人很少进行大规模的贸易和工业发展；受过教育的小阶层也从未建立起重要的行会或专业协会。俄罗斯始终是一个由沙皇专断且原则上不受限制的权力所主导的政治实体；由此造成的语言后果是，俄语在任何地方都未能在一个有抱负和影响力的群体中发展出强大的基础。

What Russia always lacked, above all, was a bourgeoisie, a class of merchants and professionals of independent status and means, which could serve as a link, both for social mobility and for flow of income, between the governing class and the workers on the land. Large-scale trade and industrial development was rarely undertaken by Russians in the pre-revolutionary era; and the small educated classes never built up significant guilds or professional associations. Russia remained a polity dominated by the arbitrary, and in principle unlimited, powers of the Tsar; and the linguistic effects of this were that the Russian language nowhere developed a strong base in a community with aspirations and influence.

简而言之，至少在二十世纪之前，俄罗斯虽然在沙皇政府的统治下实现了政治和军事上的统一，但在语言共同体层面却并未实现统一，甚至没有形成统一的文化。在东北部的波罗的海沿岸省份和南部的穆斯林地区，俄语的普及程度仅限于定居者和少数行政人员。

In short, at least until the twentieth century, Russia, although unified politically and militarily by the Tsar’s government, was not unified, nor even growing together, as a language community. In the Baltic provinces to the north-east, and the Muslim lands to the south, Russian was simply not penetrating beyond the ranks of settlers, and the small number of administrators.

苏联实验

The Soviet experiment

本文对俄语传播的论述主要集中在沙皇帝国时期，因为1917年的俄国革命及其后的苏联时期对俄语的传播影响甚微。尽管早期人们抱有希望，并且所有非俄罗斯地区（包括白俄罗斯和乌克兰）都曾试图脱离俄罗斯，但新政府最终几乎在所有地区都重新确立了统治。芬兰凭借武力实现了永久脱离；但其他波罗的海国家在20世纪20年代和30年代曾短暂独立，但从1940年起又重新落入俄罗斯的控制之下。帝国的其他部分到1922年也全部回归了俄罗斯的版图。

This account of the spread of Russian has concentrated on the Tsar’s empire, because the Russian revolution of 1917, and the Soviet era that came after it, had little net effect on the language situation. Despite early expectations, and attempts at secession in all the non-Russian areas (including Belarus and the Ukraine), the new government proved able to reassert its control almost everywhere. Finland, by dint of arms, did manage to detach itself permanently; but the other Baltic states, which had a brief period of independence in the 1920s and 1930s, found themselves back under Russian control from 1940. Other parts of the empire were all back in the fold by 1922.

苏联时期确实发生了一些变化，其中之一便是语言政策。正如我们所见，沙皇的政策，即便在其统治的最后十年，也是“加强俄罗斯国家，并保持其俄罗斯精神”，而苏联对联盟的官方政策几乎截然相反。原则上，联盟内所有民族一律平等；不设官方语言。此外，每个人不仅享有使用本民族语言进行一切活动的权利，也享有接受本民族语言教育的权利。显然，俄语仍然是联盟内不同地区之间交流的唯一选择；革命后唯一没有改变的是国家整体的中央集权。

One thing that did change under the Soviets was language policy. Whereas, as we saw, the policy of the Tsars, even in their last decade, was ‘to strengthen the Russian State, and keep it Russian in spirit’, the Soviets’ official policy for the Union was almost the polar opposite. In principle, all the peoples of the Union were to be equal; there would be no official language. Furthermore, everyone had rights, not only to the use of their own languages for all purposes, but also to education in them. Russian evidently remained the only choice for communication among different parts of the Union; one thing that did not change after the revolution was the centralised control of the country as a whole.

一项立竿见影的务实政策是普及全民识字。这项工作始于沙皇时期，但正如人口普查所显示的那样，后续工作取得了巨大的成功。1897年，9至49岁人口的识字率为28.4%；1920年，这一数字上升至44.1%；到1926年，已达56.6%；1939年，87.4%；1959年，98.5%；1970年，99.7%。 ⁶²由于这包括俄语以外的其他语言的识字能力（即使在1970年，也只有77.5%的人声称俄语是第一或第二语言 ⁶³），因此，普及全民识字的必要前提是为该国的各种语言提供有效的书写系统。 1918年，俄语正字法进行了简化，使其更符合语音，主要通过替换发音不明显的字母i、θ和θ来实现。（在本节开头引用的陀思妥耶夫斯基的段落中仍然可以看到这些字母。）苏联其他没有书写传统的语言也被赋予了字母。20世纪20年代，这些字母大多基于拉丁字母，因为语音学家对拉丁字母的完善程度最高。苏联语言学家在制定标准文字时往往需要高超的技巧，他们需要在各种方言之间找到统一的标准形式，同时兼顾大多数人的使用习惯、相互理解性和易学性。总体而言，系统趋于稳定，并由此产生了数十种新的“文学语言”（literaturnïye yazïki）。随后，政治权力格局的本质开始显现。

An immediate practical policy was to build mass literacy. This process had begun under the tsars, but the continuation was triumphantly successful, as the censuses showed. In 1897, 28.4 per cent of those aged between nine and forty-nine had been able to read; in 1920, the figure went up to 44.1 per cent; by 1926 it was already 56.6 per cent; in 1939, 87.4 per cent; in 1959, 98.5 per cent; and in 1970, 99.7 per cent.⁶² Since this included literacy in languages other than Russian (even in 1970, only 77.5 per cent claimed to have Russian as a first or second language⁶³), a necessary precondition of this was provision of effective writing systems for the country’s languages. Russian orthography was simplified in 1918 to be more phonetic, mostly by replacing the letters i, θ and , which did not have a distinct pronunciation. (They can still be seen in the passage of Dostoyevsky that begins this section.) Other languages of the Union that had no writing tradition were given alphabets. In the 1920s, these were based mostly on Latin letters, since this alphabet had been most thoroughly developed by phoneticians. The systems often involved considerable skill by Soviet linguists in fixing a standard form among dialects, balancing considerations of majority usage with mutual intelligibility and ease of acquisition. By and large stability was achieved, creating dozens of new ‘literary languages’ (literaturnïye yazïki). Then the nature of the political power situation began to make itself felt.

苏联如同之前的沙皇俄国一样，自1918年以来一直实行中央集权统治，更确切地说是以莫斯科为中心。因此，俄罗斯人的实际统治地位——尽管社会和政治流动性大大增强——开始凌驾于理论上的平等之上，尤其是在20世纪30年代，当苏联意识到自己是唯一一个建立了稳定的马克思主义政权的国家，并且四面受敌时，这种统治地位显得尤为重要，甚至令人感到安心；在20世纪30年代，无论是出于自愿还是被迫，除波罗的海三国、格鲁吉亚、亚美尼亚和意第绪语民族外，所有民族都开始宣布将他们的正字法改为某种与俄语相同的西里尔字母。社会主义世界的边界与旧俄罗斯帝国的边界重合这一奇特的现象，如今被赋予了截然不同的意义。正如一位后来的辩护者所说：

The Soviet Union had remained, like imperial Russia before it, steadfastly governed from the centre, since 1918 more specifically from Moscow. The de facto dominance of Russians, therefore—admittedly leavened by much greater social and political mobility—began to take precedence over the theoretical equality of all, especially when it became clear in the 1930s that the Soviet Union was alone in having set up a stable Marxist-oriented regime, now surrounded on all sides by enemies. Now the primacy of Russian began to seem more important, even comforting; and in the 1930s, by choice or force, all the different nationalities (except for the Baltics, Georgian, Armenian and Yiddish) came to declare in favour of switching their orthographies to some variant of the Cyrillic alphabet used for Russian. The strange fact that the boundaries of the socialist world were coincident with those of the old Russian empire was now suffused in quite a different light. As a later apologist put it:

因为俄语是联盟中最发达国家的语言，这个国家引领着国家经历了革命性的变革，赢得了其他所有民族的爱戴和尊重，所以俄语自然而然地转变为社会主义国家所有民族的沟通与合作语言。这是由于……以往的心理障碍被兄弟般的友谊、互信互助的纽带所取代。64^俄语现在具备了取得重大进展的条件。普及教育已成为现实，俄语被列为所有学校的必修课。与沙皇时期相比，俄语本应更有可能被全国人民所了解和使用。然而，不知何故，这种情况并没有发生。正如我们已经提到的，1970年仍有22.5%的人声称自己无法有效掌握俄语。无论是为了维持传统社区的生存（尤其是在中亚地区），还是为了维护对俄罗斯统治的怨恨（尤其是在波罗的海地区），许多人仍然设法在没有俄语的情况下生活。

Because [Russian] is the language of the Union’s most developed nation, which has guided the country through its revolutionary transformations and has won itself the love and respect of all other peoples, the Russian language is naturally being transformed into the language of communication and cooperation of all the peoples of the socialist state. This has been produced by… a replacement of previous psychological barriers by bonds of brotherly friendship, mutual trust and mutual help.⁶⁴ Russian was now in a position to make major strides. Universal education was a reality, and Russian was introduced as a compulsory subject in all schools. Far more than under the tsars, it should have been possible for it to become known and used by everyone throughout the country. Somehow, though, this did not happen. As we have already noted, in 1970 there were still 22.5 per cent who claimed not to have effective command of it. Whether through the survival of traditional communities—especially in central Asia—or the preservation of resentment at Russian dominance—especially in the Baltic—many continued to contrive to live their lives without Russian.

1992年1月1日苏联解体后，包括乌克兰和白俄罗斯在内的所有加盟共和国都脱离苏联，成为独立国家。俄语在教育领域的前景，以及作为原苏联各加盟共和国之间长期通用语的地位，随即黯然失色。

When the Soviet Union was dissolved on 1 January 1992, all its constituent republics, including Ukraine and Belarus, split off as independent states. The prospects for Russian in education, and hence as a long-term lingua franca among the old parts of the empire, were immediately diminished.

尽管在原苏联境内已无法强制使用俄语，但它不可避免地成为一种重要的政治象征，其具体含义因地域历史而异。在波罗的海三国中，拉脱维亚和爱沙尼亚正在设立语言考试，迫使其境内的俄罗斯族居民证明其母语能力；而立陶宛的俄语人口比例远低于两国，因此无需进行此类考试。^*白俄罗斯政府在1995年政策发生根本性转变后，仍然坚持将俄语作为工作语言，并贬低其本国语言。^†一些共和国，例如摩尔多瓦和哈萨克斯坦，由于其境内居住着大量俄语少数族裔，因此在推广其主要语言方面必须格外谨慎。在哈萨克斯坦，俄语被公认为官方语言，而政客们糟糕的哈萨克语水平也成了人们津津乐道的笑谈。相比之下，在中亚，民族语言的使用出现了明显的复兴，而俄语的使用则有所下降——这主要体现在政治阶层中，而这些阶层在独立前恰恰是俄语使用最广泛的群体之一。 ⁶⁵ 在这里，如同在波罗的海国家一样，英语作为第二语言的使用正在不断增长。§只有在西伯利亚——罗斯最古老的殖民地——才能说俄语的使用是稳定的，而且可能还在不断发展壮大。令人遗憾的是，这是因为西伯利亚的大多数土著语言社群都面临着严重的生存危机，大量欧洲俄罗斯人的存在破坏了他们传统的生活方式。这些社群规模太小、位置太偏远、实力太弱，除了与俄罗斯人合作之外，他们别无选择。

But although the use of Russian can no longer be enforced across the extent of the old Union, it has inevitably become an important political token, with different nuances dependent on local history. Among the Baltic states, Latvia and Estonia are setting linguistic exams to force their resident Russians to prove competence in their own languages; these are unnecessary in Lithuania, where the Russian-speaking minority is so much smaller.^* The Belarusian government is maintaining Russian as its working language, after a radical shift in policy in 1995, and demeaning its own national language.^† Republics with large Russian-speaking minorities inhabiting a single region, notably Moldova and Kazakhstan, have to be highly judicious in balancing the degree to which they can assert their majority language. In Kazakhstan Russian is recognised as a language of official communication, and it remains a standing joke how poor politicians’ command of Kazakh tends to be. In central Asia, by contrast, there has been a discernible resurgence of national language use—and decline of Russian—among the political classes who were actually among the most prolific Russian speakers before independence.⁶⁵ Here, as in the Baltics, English is growing in use as a second language.^§ Only in Siberia, Rus’s oldest colony, can it be said that use of Russian is secure, and probably still gaining speakers. Sadly, this is because most of Siberia’s indigenous language communities are highly endangered, their traditional way of life shattered by the presence among them of large numbers of European Russians. They are too small, too isolated, and too weakened, to be able to envisage any future but collaboration with Russians.

在世界各地，使用俄语更多地体现了人们对苏联历史的情感以及对未来的憧憬，而非将其视为与邻国沟通的实用手段。即使在共产主义垮台之后，俄语仍然是一种高度意识形态化的语言。

Everywhere, use of Russian is more significant as a sign of feelings about the Soviet past, and of aspirations for the future, than as a practical choice of means of communication with the neighbours. Russian, even after the fall of communism, remains a highly ideological language.

结论

Conclusions

一种帝国语言在其传播帝国解体后得以延续，主要有以下四个原因。

There are four main reasons why an imperial language lives on after the dissolution of the empire that spread it.

首先，因为它仍然是那些推翻帝国统治的人民的语言。这可以称之为克里奥尔语理由。所有从欧洲宗主国手中争取独立的美国殖民地都是如此：无论是在英国的十三殖民地、墨西哥、中美洲和南美洲的共和国，还是巴西王国，发动革命的都不是当地土著居民，而是欧洲殖民者的后裔，他们对宗主国语言的依恋程度不亚于宗主国本身。同样，南非保留了南非荷兰语，加拿大和阿尔及利亚保留了法语。从某种意义上说，殖民者的语言社群一直延续至今。

The first is because it remains the language of the people who dissolve the empire. This can be called the creole reason. It was true of all the American colonies that fought and obtained independence from their mother countries in Europe: in every case, in the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain, in Mexico, in the republics of Central and South America, and the kingdom of Brazil, the people who made the revolutions were not the indigenous people but the descendants of the European colonists, who were as attached to the metropolitan language as the mother country herself. Likewise it maintained Afrikaans in South Africa, and French in Canada and Algeria. In some sense, the settlers’ language communities have continued unbroken.

第二个原因是，新独立的国家希望与宗主国保持联系，无论是贸易、文化，甚至是国防方面的联系。这可以称之为怀旧情结。这也是法语在撒哈拉以南非洲地区经久不衰的部分原因。这也是菲律宾至今仍保留着西班牙语痕迹的原因，以及2002年独立的东帝汶选择继续使用——或者更确切地说是复兴——葡萄牙语的原因。

The second reason is because the newly independent countries want to retain a link, of trade or culture, perhaps even of defence, with the metropolitan power. This can be called the nostalgia reason. It is part of the reason why French has hung on in sub-Saharan Africa. It is also why there is still a trace of Spanish in the Philippines, and also why East Timor, independent in 2002, opted to continue—or rather resurrect—its use of Portuguese.

第二个原因通常与第三个原因（可称之为统一性原因）相辅相成。殖民强权不可避免地会在其领土内强加一种单一语言，这最终成为维持领土统一性的关键。当统治者更迭时，语言也可能随之改变（例如，西班牙语在西班牙帝国的不同领土上取代了纳瓦特尔语和克丘亚语）。但语言很可能不会改变，尤其是在没有新的征服者出现，而仅仅是独立斗争最终结束的情况下。在这种情况下，殖民语言可能会继续存在：这也是法语在撒哈拉以南非洲许多国家持续使用的另一个原因：用喀麦隆270多种本土语言中的任何一种来管理该国都是不切实际的。而讽刺的是，马来语正是被荷兰人以及后来的印尼政府采纳为统一的“印尼语”的原因。

The second reason is often found in alliance with a third, which can be called the unity reason. A colonial power inevitably imposes a single language on a domain, which ends up being essential to maintaining it as a coherent unit. When the power changes, the language may change too (as for example it did when Spanish replaced both Nahuatl and Quechua in different dominions of the Spanish empire). But quite likely it does not, especially where there is no new conqueror but simply the culmination of a struggle for independence. In that case, the colonial language may linger on: this is another reason for the persistence of French in so many countries of sub-Saharan Africa: it just would not be practicable to administer Cameroon in any one of its 270-plus indigenous languages. And this is, perversely, why Malay was taken up as the unifying ‘Bahasa Indonesia’—by the Dutch just as much as the Indonesian government that followed them.

还有第四个原因，即全球化原因。一个国家之所以会继续使用帝国语言，并非因为它能维系与昔日殖民强权的联系，而是因为它提供了一种超越殖民统治的途径。对于当今时代那些保留或采用英语的国家而言，这无疑是一个普遍的真理；而对于18、19世纪的俄罗斯精英阶层而言，这同样也是他们采用法语的真正动机。

There is a fourth reason, the globality reason. A country may persist with an imperial language, not because it gives a link to the old colonial power, but because it provides a means to transcend it. This is very widely true of countries that maintain or adopt English in the current era; but it is just as truly the motive for the Russian elite’s adoption of French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

俄语在其使用者的帝国不复存在后，未能强势生存下来的明显失败，可以从以下四个原因中更清楚地看出。

The apparent failure of the Russian language to survive strongly where its speakers’ empire is no more can be viewed more clearly in the light of these four reasons.

克里奥尔语的成因只适用于西伯利亚，因为基本上只有在这里，俄罗斯帝国主义者才大规模定居，从而压倒了当地土著居民。他们在爱沙尼亚和拉脱维亚也逐渐接近这种程度，在哈萨克斯坦则稍逊一筹：但那里的权力——以及语言的未来——最终仍然掌握在原居民手中。

The creole reason applies only in Siberia, since by and large it is only here that the Russian imperialists settled in large enough numbers to overwhelm the indigenous people. They are approaching this sort of concentration in Estonia and Latvia, and less so in Kazakhstan: but the power there—and hence the linguistic future—has ultimately remained with the previous inhabitants.

在原苏联加盟共和国，人们并不普遍需要维系与俄罗斯的怀旧情结；令人遗憾的是，这些昔日的臣民似乎对俄罗斯长达几个世纪的统治鲜有深厚的感情。但有一个例外：白俄罗斯。该国政府正积极寻求通过与俄罗斯建立更紧密的联系来改善自身状况，因此，他们对俄罗斯的热情也异常高涨。

The need to retain nostalgic links with the Russians is not widespread in the old Soviet realms; sadly, their old subjects seem to remember little with affection from the long centuries of Russian power. But there is one exception: Belarus, whose government is actively seeking betterment through closer links with Russia, and whose enthusiasm for Russian is correspondingly strong.

总的来说，各个共和国在其各自领土内，通过使用本共和国的语言，可以实现相当程度的统一；除了俄罗斯本土之外，没有理由坚持使用俄语。俄罗斯的西伯利亚地区是旧帝国境内语言最多元的地区。而且正如我们所见，那里的小型语言社群力量太弱，无法对俄语的统一组织构成实质性的抵抗。

By and large, the different republics can achieve substantial unity, each on its own territory, through use of its own language; there is no unity reason to persist with Russian, except in Russia itself, whose Siberian territories are by far the most multilingual in the old empire. And as we have seen, the tiny language communities there are too weak to put up substantial resistance to the unifying grip of organisation in Russian.

最后，关于全球化：令人遗憾的是，在当今世界通信时代，对于俄罗斯人来说，最有利可图的联系显然不是与俄罗斯文化泰斗建立的；其他国家似乎更自由、更时尚、更强大，最重要的是，更富有。

Finally, as to globality: sadly too for Russian, in the current age of world communications, it is very evident that the most profitable links are not to be had with the doyens of Russian culture; other lands appear to be freer, more stylish, more powerful and, above all, richer.

然而，具有讽刺意味的是，或许正是基于此，俄罗斯文化有朝一日能够复兴。正如十九世纪所展现的那样，俄罗斯知识分子拥有非凡的想象力；而二十世纪也表明，他们的科学家，即便在国家严密且目光短浅的控制下，只要获得可观的财政支持，也能与世界任何科学家比肩。如果能拥有一个比以往更加稳定和自由的政府，俄罗斯文化或许终将发展成为一种令其前殖民地乐于传承和发展俄罗斯文化及其语言的全新形式。

Ironically, though, it may be on just this ground that Russian may one day stage a comeback. As the nineteenth century showed, the Russian intelligentsia is capable of remarkable flights of human imagination; and as the twentieth century showed, their scientists, when given respectable financial support—even under tight, and blinkered, state control—are the equal of any in the world. Given a stable and more liberal government than it has hitherto known, Russian culture may yet grow into a form that will make Russia’s former colonies glad to cultivate it, and its language.

我们对大多数欧洲帝国主义列强的语言发展历程进行了简要回顾，发现帝国的建立、扩张和衰落的方式多种多样，而帝国主义语言的长期传播与否也未必能解释这一现象。西班牙语言的真正传播始于其建立帝国约两个世纪之后。葡萄牙语似乎在印度洋沿岸的传播几乎与其使用者的发展无关；最终，葡萄牙语在巴西发展最为强劲，而葡萄牙人在那里最缺乏发挥其商业才能的空间。相比之下，荷兰语几乎没有传播，尽管荷兰人作为帝国主义者比葡萄牙人更加高效、更加持久。法国的海外征服往往建立得很快，消失得也很快；但有时法语即使在新的统治者统治下也能在那里存续下来，而且那些曾经接触过法语的人，在驱逐征服者之后，往往会倾向于继续使用法语。与此形成鲜明对比的是，五百多年来，俄罗斯从其位于东北欧的中心平原向四面八方扩张，直至遇到足以抵抗其扩张的强大势力。直到1992年，其扩张似乎已不可逆转。然而，在过去十年中，它却展现出在数个世纪的稳步扩张中，自己结交的朋友寥寥无几。

Our quick review of the linguistic careers of most of the European imperial powers has revealed a bewildering variety of ways in which empire can be won, exercised and lost, with and without long-term transmission of the imperialist’s language. The serious spread of Spain’s language began some two centuries after it established its empire. The Portuguese language seemed to spread round the Indian Ocean almost independently of its speakers’ progress; and ultimately, it grew strongest in Brazil, where the Portuguese had least scope for their great talent, commerce. The Dutch language, by contrast, hardly spread at all, though the Dutch themselves were far more effective, and more permanent, than the Portuguese as imperialists. French overseas conquests tended to vanish almost as quickly as they were built up; but sometimes French survived there, even under new overlords, and there was a pronounced tendency for those once exposed to the French language to want to keep in touch with it after they had expelled the conquerors. In another contrast, over five hundred years Russian spread itself in every direction from its central plain of north-east Europe, essentially until it encountered any power strong enough to resist it. Until 1992, its spread seemed irreversible. And yet, in the last decade, it has shown how few friends it made in all those centuries of stable advance.

但有一种看似简单却站得住脚的偏见：任何外国帝国都倾向于传播某种语言。这种语言可能并非当地语言，也并非统治者的语言，例如马来语在荷属东印度群岛占据主导地位；而且，这种语言在外国统治结束后也可能不会长期存在，例如俄语正在俄罗斯的前殖民地逐渐消失。但是，在一个被置于共同的外部统治之下的地区，拥有共同语言是一种实际的需要，而这种需要往往会促进语言的传播，尤其是在统治持续较长时间的情况下，因为在后代中，当地人会被招募来代表外国势力并与外国势力进行沟通。

But there is one simplistic prejudice that does seem to hold up: any foreign empire does tend to spread some language. It may not be a local language, not that of the dominant power, as Malay came to dominate the Dutch Indies; and it may not persist long after the departure of foreign control, as Russian is slipping away from Russia’s ex-colonies. But a common language is a practical necessity in a territory brought under common, external, control, and this necessity tends to foster language spread if the domination persists over time, with recruitment of local people to represent, and interface with, the foreign power in later generations.

从这个意义上讲，内布里哈是对的。

In this sense, Nebrija was right.

出人意料地无效——德国的野心

Curiously ineffective—German ambitions

Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter self-vergebens。

Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

愚蠢之举，连众神都徒劳无功。

With stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain

弗里德里希·冯·席勒，《奥尔良少女峰》，1801，iii.6

Friedrich von Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 1801, iii.6

尽管德语拥有重要的文化地位，且在十九世纪曾有过多次卓著的全球推广尝试，但我们的书中却长期忽略了一种重要的欧洲语言。这种语言正是马丁·路德的母语，他通过印刷文字的革命引领了宗教改革。（参见第九章，第326页。）德语作为一种潜在的全球语言，似乎总是充满坎坷，屡屡令人失望。

One major European language has been largely neglected in our pages, despite its major cultural status, and the sterling attempts to spread it round the world in the nineteenth century. This is German, none other than the language of Martin Luther, which led off the Reformation through a revolution in the printed word. (See Chapter 9, p. 326.) There is something almost accident-prone about German as a potential global language, many times disappointed.

五世纪初（见第七章“Einfall：日耳曼语和斯拉夫语的扩张”，第304页），德语使用者横扫整个西罗马帝国，从不列颠到北非，并在他们占领的每个国家都确立了世袭君主的地位。然而，德语仅在英格兰取得了语言上的成功。除此之外，德语主要局限于其位于北欧的原始区域，并且在早期甚至在东部地区，直至巴尔干半岛，都败给了斯拉夫语。（见第七章“巴尔干半岛的斯拉夫语曙光”，第309页。）^*但在十世纪，以及十二、十三世纪，大量日耳曼人向东迁徙，越过易北河，一直延伸到奥得河畔的现代波兰边境及其以东地区，使这些地区逐渐成为以德语为主的地区。德语也通过商人和犹太人的口语传播到东南欧的许多城市。

In the opening years of the fifth century (see Chapter 7, ‘Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances’, p. 304) its speakers overran the whole western Roman empire, from Britain to North Africa, permanently installing their leaders as hereditary monarchs in every country they took. Yet the only linguistic gain made was in England. Otherwise German remained largely restricted to its original territory in northern Europe, and in this early period even lost ground to Slavonic in the eastern parts down into the Balkans. (See Chapter 7, ‘Slavonic dawn in the Balkans’, p. 309.)^* But in the tenth, and again in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there were large migrations of Germans eastward across the Elbe up to and beyond the modern Polish border on the Oder, turning them into predominantly German-speaking regions. German also spread into many cities in south-eastern Europe, on the lips of merchants and Jews.

与此同时，在更北的地方，一场更为严密且好战的变革正在酝酿。1226年，条顿骑士团奉命对抗异教徒，神圣罗马帝国皇帝腓特烈二世将东普鲁士赐予他们。他们以武力征服了这片土地，直到1242年才被著名的亚历山大·涅夫斯基^{阻止，未能继续向俄罗斯扩张。}^†从1280年到1410年，他们的追随者在波罗的海沿岸建立了1400个村庄和93个城镇，^德语也从普鲁士传播到爱沙尼亚。在瑞典和俄罗斯统治的变迁中，德国地主们成功地保持了长达五个世纪的精英地位，直到1917年的动荡。

Meanwhile, farther north, something much more structured and warlike was afoot. In 1226, the Teutonic knights, called in to fight the heathen, were gifted East Prussia by the Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich II. They made good their ownership with the sword and the plough, and were only stopped from pressing on into Russia by the famed Aleksandr N^yevskiy in 1242.^† From 1280 to 1410, their followers founded 1400 villages and ninety-three towns along the Baltic shores,⁶⁶ and the German language was established from Prussia to Estonia. The German landowners succeeded in retaining their elite status for five centuries, through vicissitudes of Swedish and Russian overlordship, until the turmoil of 1917.

与此同时，重大事件震撼了德意志祖国。中世纪时期，它以“神圣罗马帝国”之名——通常与意大利大部分地区合并——而德语却并未因此而衰落。然而，随着宗教改革的到来，旧秩序瓦解，德国发现自己变得脆弱不堪。十七世纪，三十年战争（1618-1648）使德国满目疮痍，这场战争使天主教徒与新教徒兵戎相见。但此后，尽管政治稳定和军事安全依然遥不可及，但德语使用者凭借其创新严谨的精神——以及后来的浪漫主义——迎来了科学、艺术和各种学术领域的黄金时代；德语和德语文学也因此享誉世界，首次在国际声誉上与法语比肩。十八世纪是莱辛、歌德和席勒、莫扎特和贝多芬、赫尔德和洪堡兄弟、康德和黑格尔的时代，这确保了启蒙运动（德国人称之为“启蒙”）的许多关键思想首先是用德语表达的。

Meanwhile great events had shaken the German fatherland. It had sat out the Middle Ages under the alias of the ‘Holy Roman Empire’—in combination often with much of Italy, though without any loss of its German language—but when the Reformation came and the old structures disintegrated, Germany found itself vulnerable. In the seventeenth century the country was widely devastated by the Thirty Years War (1618-48), pitting Catholics against Protestants. But thereafter, although political stability and military security continued to elude them, German speakers were rewarded for their innovative seriousness—and later their Romanticism—with a golden age in science, the arts and all kinds of scholarship; and the German language and literature achieved world prominence, for the first time equalling French in international respect. The eighteenth century was the era of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven, Herder and the brothers Humboldt, Kant and Hegel, ensuring that many of the key ideas of the Enlightenment (known to Germans as die Aufklärung) were first expressed in German.

自神圣罗马帝国解体以来，南部的德语使用者在哈布斯堡王朝统治下的奥地利王国（Österreich，意为“东方王国”）内保持着相对统一。但在19世纪，奥地利以北的大部分德语领土在普鲁士强有力的、公开宣扬军国主义的领导下被强行统一，并被冠以“德意志帝国”（Deutsches Reich）之名。作为19世纪的欧洲强国，这个新生的德国自然感到需要海外殖民地：在19世纪80年代，它迅速占领了非洲的四个地区——多哥兰、喀麦隆、西南非洲（纳米比亚）和东非（坦噶尼喀）；在19世纪90年代，又占领了巴布亚东北部和太平洋的大部分密克罗尼西亚群岛。所有这些德皇的新臣民刚刚开始接受德语教育，德国便在第一次世界大战中战败。 1919 年在凡尔赛，德语失去了所有海外领土，这些领土的行政管理语言分别改为法语、英语和（在密克罗尼西亚）日语。

Since the breakdown of the Holy Roman Empire, German speakers in the south had remained relatively united in the kingdom of Austria (Österreich—’the easterly kingdom’), ruled by the Habsburg dynasty. But in the nineteenth century, most of the Germans’ territories to the north of this were forcibly united under the strong, avowedly militarist leadership of Prussia, billing its creation as a renewed deutsches Reich, ‘German Empire’. As a nineteenth-century European power, this new Germany naturally felt that it needed colonies abroad: in short order, it took possession of four territories in Africa—Togoland, Cameroon, Southwest Africa (Namibia) and East Africa (Tanganyika)—in the 1880s, and north-east Papua and most of the Micronesian islands in the Pacific in the 1890s. All these new subjects of the Kaiser were just beginning to receive instruction in the German language when Germany emerged defeated from the First World War; at Versailles in 1919, the German language lost all its overseas territories, their administrations being switched to French, English and (in Micronesia) Japanese.

1939年，德国扩张主义精神孤注一掷，短暂地将一个全新的、更加强大的帝国强加于欧洲大陆北部和中部的大部分地区，从大西洋一直延伸到乌拉尔山脉。然而，这六年“总体战”（ totalen Krieg）——即其维持统治的全部时期——太过短暂，不足以展现德语在语言发展方面是否取得了任何进展。德国征服欧洲邻国的方式显然并非为了赢得朋友或拥护者；但战后很可能在东部地区出现了德意志人的定居点，其目的是为了清除斯拉夫语使用者，或许在庞大的强制劳动营网络中，混杂的人口中也会出现以德语为基础的克里奥尔语。然而，最终，政客们对军事荣耀的疯狂追求几乎抹杀了德语在18世纪和19世纪所取得的语言影响力。 20 世纪 30 年代，各领域的杰出科学家、艺术家和知识分子，尤其是讲德语的犹太人，成群结队地流亡海外——特别是前往美国，在那里他们学会了说英语；而在战后时期，德语与纳粹的联系仍然鲜明，这使得德语在祖国以外的地方使用受到限制。

The expansive German spirit made a dramatic and desperate last throw in 1939, briefly imposing a new and greater Reich over most of the northern and central reaches of continental Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals; but the six years of totalen Krieg, ‘total war’, which made up the full period for which it was able to maintain its grip, were too short to show whether any linguistic gains for German were in train. Germany’s style of conquest of its European neighbours was certainly not adapted to win friends or admirers; but there would probably have been post-war settlements of Germans to the east, aimed at sweeping aside speakers of Slavonic languages, and perhaps German-based Creoles may have grown up among mixed populations in a vast network of forced labour camps. As it was, the politicians’ demented push for military glory ended up almost erasing the language influence that German had achieved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the 1930s, serious scientists, artists and intellectuals in every field, especially German-speaking Jews, left in droves for exile abroad—especially to the USA, where they became English speakers; and in the post-war era, the still-fresh Nazi associations of German discouraged much use of it outside its home countries.

希特勒那令人痛苦的、直截了当的“征服世界”的野心，幸运的是很快就被挫败了；但在文化上，它早已被证明是自取灭亡。如今，德国和奥地利作为成熟的民主国家，在二十一世纪的形势下扮演着领导角色，处于一个名义上正在寻求“更加紧密联合”的欧洲中心，德语能否在新形势下重获声望，这将是一件值得关注的事情。

Hitler’s painfully direct Drang nach Weltherrschaft, ‘drive for world domination’, was mercifully soon defeated; but culturally, it had already proved self-defeating. It will be interesting to see whether the German language can begin to enhance its prestige in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century, with Germany and Austria now playing leading roles as well-established democracies, at the centre of a Europe which is, nominally at least, seeking ‘ever closer union’.

帝国尾声：古民家

Imperial epilogue: Kōminka

孝民化：对臣民的帝国化……如果没有对天皇无限仁慈的深切感恩之心，临时臣民就无法理解成为日本人的真正含义……虽然孝民化作为一个概念可能显得抽象难懂，但其基本原则与《教育敕令》相同；理解其中之一，便能理解另一个。

Kōminka: The imperialization of subject peoples… Without this sense of profound gratitude for the limitless benevolence of the Emperor, provisional subjects cannot grasp the true meaning of what it is to be Japanese… While Kōminka as a concept may seem abstract and difficult to grasp, its fundamental principles are the same as those of the Imperial Rescript on Education; to understand one is to understand the other.

鹫津屋，《台湾政府回忆录》，台北，1943年，第339页

Washisu Atsuya, Recollections of Government in Taiwan, Taipei, 1943, p. 339

臣民们，当孝敬父母，亲近兄弟姐妹；夫妻要和睦相处，朋友要真诚相待；要忍耐。

Ye subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious, as friends true; bear

你们要谦逊节制；要向所有人施以仁慈；要追求学问，培养技艺，从而发展智力和完善道德能力；要自愿促进共同利益；

yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers; voluntarily promote common interests;

从事公共事务时，始终要尊重宪法，遵守法律；

embarking on public affairs always respect the Constitution and observe the laws;

若有紧急情况发生，应勇敢地履行职责；这样才能帮助皇座永远繁荣昌盛，如同天地一般。

in case emergency arises, serve courageously; and thus aid the prosperity of the Imperial Throne eternal as heaven and earth.

摘自《Kyōiku ni kansuru Chokugo》

From the Kyōiku ni kansuru Chokugo

1890年10月30日颁布的《教育诏书》张贴在日本所有学校，与天皇画像并列。

(Imperial Rescript on Education) of 30 October 1890, displayed in all Japanese schools, beside the portrait of the emperor

我们必须在美国亚洲边缘建立一个全新的、欧洲式的帝国。

We have to establish a new, European-style empire on the edge of Asia.

井上薰，日本外相，1887年⁶⁷

Inoue Kaoru, Japanese foreign minister, 1887⁶⁷

日本显然不是欧洲强国。但它建立海外帝国的动机却深受欧洲的影响。如果将日本的扩张视为欧洲帝国扩张的延续，那么这段简短的历史就展现了此类语言传播的诸多因果关系、方法以及最终的虚妄。

Japan is evidently no European power. But the motive with which it won for itself an overseas empire was of European inspiration. And viewed as a sequel to European empire-building, the brief story of this venture displays much of the causation, the methods and ultimate vanity of this type of language spread.

在1853年美国海军准将佩里率领的“黑船”舰队访问日本之前，日本一直是一个严格的闭关锁国；到1858年，日本被迫与欧洲列强签订贸易条约。此后，一系列暴力事件动摇了德川幕府的传统统治，也让一些日本人对外国人的军事力量，特别是英国海军的实力印象深刻。1868年，这些激进分子高喊着“尊崇天皇，驱逐蛮夷”和“富国强军”等口号，推翻了延续^了两个半世纪的封建政权，并在年轻的明治天皇（他于1867年即位）的名义监督下，建立了一个彻底西化的新政权。日本还派遣考察队前往欧洲和美国，了解这些政权的组织方式。到1889年，日本已颁布新宪法，设立了两院制国会（一院为世袭，另一院由富裕的户主选举产生）、中央任命的都道府县知事、直接向天皇负责（因此不受文官控制）的陆军参谋部，以及国家公务员制度、警察部队、银行和教育体系。短短一代人的时间，日本就跻身西方列强之列，并开始展现其独立自主的姿态。

Japan had been a strictly isolationist state until visited in 1853 by the American Commodore Perry’s ‘Black Ships’; by 1858, it had been forced to conclude trade treaties with the major European powers. The traditional rule of the Tokugawa shogun was then unsettled in a number of violent incidents, which impressed some Japanese with the military power of the foreigners, especially the British navy. In 1868, shouting such slogans as son nō jō i, ‘honour emperor; expel barbarians’, and fu koku kyō hei, ‘rich country; strong army’,^* these radicals overthrew the feudally based government that had lasted for the previous two and a half centuries, and established a new, radically Westernising, regime under the nominal supervision of the young Emperor Meiji, who had conveniently come to the throne in 1867. Expeditions were dispatched to Europe and the USA to find out how they were organised. By 1889 Japan had adopted a new constitution, with two houses of parliament (one hereditary and another elected by wealthy householders), centrally appointed prefectural governors, an army general staff directly responsible to the emperor (and hence immune from civilian control), and a national civil service, police force, banking and educational system. Within a single generation, Japan had put itself on a par with the leading Western powers, and proceeded to demonstrate its independence.

日本殖民战争的主要战略动机是朝鲜。日本当时正从西方学习地缘政治；而日本帝国陆军的德国顾问梅克尔少校则将朝鲜比作“刺入日本心脏的匕首”，认为它对敌对势力极具价值。在19世纪70年代初，那些失去土地的武士——这个古老的骑士阶层是日本现代化进程中的主要失败者——几乎发动了对日本的全面入侵。然而，1894年，日本邀请中国出兵朝鲜，协助镇压叛乱，而日本则以条约赋予的确保朝鲜中立的权利为由，也加入了战争。日本人开始炫耀武力，绑架朝鲜国王和王后以示强硬；而中国的抵抗不仅徒劳无功，而且代价惨重。在1895年的战争协议中，中国被迫将台湾和澎湖列岛割让给日本：这些岛屿成为了日本的第一个殖民地。

The main strategic motive for Japan’s colonial wars was Korea. Japan was taking lessons in geopolitics from the West; and Major Meckel, the German adviser to the Imperial Army, had characterised Korea as ‘a dagger thrust at the heart of Japan’, thinking of its value to a hostile power. Dispossessed samurai, the ancient class of knights who were the main losers in Japan’s modernisation, had almost drummed up an outright invasion of the country early in the 1870s. But in 1894 China was invited into Korea to help subdue a rebellion, and Japan—citing a treaty right to ensure Korea’s neutrality—came too. The Japanese started throwing their weight about, kidnapping the Korean king and queen to make their point; and Chinese resistance proved not only futile but costly. In the settlement of the war in 1895, China was forced to cede the islands of Taiwan and the Pescadores to Japan: these became Japan’s first colony.

日本继续在朝鲜投资，并不断向朝鲜政府施压，要求其进行现代化建设。1902年，日本与英国结盟，这一联盟持续了二十年。这增强了日本抵抗俄国向朝鲜扩张的信心，并最终引发了1904-1905年的日俄战争。与中国一样，俄国也发现自己严重低估了日本的军事实力。陆战（主要发生在满洲）虽然血腥，但胜负难分，俄国不仅失去了太平洋舰队，也失去了波罗的海舰队。在随后的和平中，日本获得了满洲辽东半岛及其两大良港——旅顺港和大连港，以及库页岛南部（日语称作“黑太”）。与此同时，日本对朝鲜的持续施压如今已不再受到俄国或中国的制约：朝鲜屈服了，先是沦为日本的保护国，后于1910年成为日本的殖民地。

Japan went on investing in Korea, and put increasing pressure on its government to provide for modernisation. In 1902 Japan struck an alliance with Great Britain, which was to last for twenty years. This emboldened it to resist Russian moves towards Korea, and start the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Like China, Russia found that it had seriously underestimated Japan’s military strength. The land battles (mostly in Manchuria) were bloody but inconclusive, but then Russia lost not just its Pacific, but also its Baltic, fleet. In the ensuing peace, Japan gained the Liaodong peninsula of Manchuria, with its two excellent harbours, Port Arthur and Dalian, and the southern half of Sakhalin island, called in Japanese Karafuto. Meanwhile the continuing Japanese pressure on Korea was now without competition from Russia or China: Korea buckled, becoming first a protectorate, and then, in 1910, a colony.

日本的扩张并未就此止步。它加入第一次世界大战的协约国阵营，迅速夺取了距离它最近的德国殖民地——中国东北的青岛市和密克罗尼西亚群岛。1919年，在凡尔赛会议上——法国首次在外交上向英国让步——日本被迫放弃青岛，但其对群岛的控制权（此后这些岛屿被称为“南洋群岛”）得到了确认。

Japan’s aggrandisement did not stop there. It joined the Allies in the First World War, and speedily grabbed the German possessions closest to it, the city of Qingdao in north-east China, and the islands of Micronesia. At Versailles in 1919—when French first yielded diplomatically to English—Japan was compelled to quit Qingdao, but its control of the islands, henceforth called Nan’ yō Guntō, ‘South Ocean Islands’, was confirmed.

因此，在20世纪两次世界大战之间的时期，日本在西北太平洋地区建立了一个庞大的海外帝国：台湾、满洲南部、库页岛南部、整个朝鲜半岛以及密克罗尼西亚群岛。它在这里拥有25到50年的时间，相当于一到两代人的时间，来巩固自身的统治和语言；现在，我们将简要地看一下其结果。^*

As a result of all this, during the inter-war years of the twentieth century Japan held a substantial overseas empire round the north-west Pacific: Taiwan, southern Manchuria, southern Sakhalin, all of Korea and the islands of Micronesia. Here it had between twenty-five and fifty years, one or two full generations, to impose itself and its language; and we shall now take a brief look at the results.^*

日本扩张帝国的动机对其在扩张后领土上的使用方式产生了一定影响。在这些太平洋地区，日本人并非为了贸易或工业开发而来。因此，日本派遣的平民定居者或居民寥寥无几：新来者绝大多数是士兵和行政人员。日常商业往来相对较少；大部分沟通都以当地人必须服从日本指令的形式进行。

The motives that had expanded the Japanese empire had some impact on the use of Japanese in the resulting territories. In these Pacific lands, the Japanese had not come to trade, nor for industrial exploitation. As a result, Japan sent few civilian settlers or residents: the newcomers were overwhelmingly soldiers and administrators. There would be relatively little interaction for daily business; most communication took the form of locals having to comply with Japanese instructions.

在新的殖民地，日本人的生活态度远非自由放任。台湾和朝鲜都曾长期处于中国的势力范围之内，各自拥有独立的教育体系；但日本的政策是逐步削弱沿袭自旧时代的本地学校，并以当地资金为代价，代之以日语学校。在密克罗尼西亚，识字和城市生活都起步较晚，教育目标也更为温和，学制也更短；尽管如此，其目标仍然是培养基本的日语读写能力。虽然日本人对殖民地人民的态度日益强调他们作为潜在的“大东亚共荣圈”（Dai-Tō-A Kyōeiken）成员的天然团结，但他们融入日语社群的实际压力却与日俱增。

In the new colonies, the Japanese attitude to life was far from laissez-faire. Both Taiwan and Korea had in their different ways long been parts of China’s sphere of influence, and had their own systems of education in place; but the Japanese policy was gradually to undermine the locally run schools that had survived from the previous era, and to replace them—at local cost—with Japanese-language institutions. In Micronesia, where literacy and urban life were far more recent acquisitions, the aims were more modest, and years of schooling shorter: nevertheless, they remained aimed at basic literacy in Japanese. Although the attitudes of the Japanese to the colonial peoples increasingly emphasised their natural solidarity as fellow members of a potential ‘Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’ (Dai-Tō-A Kyōeiken), the effective pressure on them all to become members of the Japanese language community only heightened.

当第二次世界大战将整个帝国置于危险境地时，这种做法的影响就显现出来了。据估计，1942年台湾有62%的人口能听懂日语，而朝鲜只有20%。 ⁶⁸但日本在1895年首次占领台湾时，选择采纳法国而非英国的建议，力图将台湾完全并入日本。^*此后，日本在占领其他殖民地时，基本上没有经过任何辩论就执行了这一政策。在20世纪初，这一建议在大型发达殖民地，尤其是在朝鲜，被证明是灾难性的：天皇的新臣民从未得到足够的信任，无法直接参与东京的政策制定，但他们也没有办法在当地至少部分掌控自己的命运。1919年朝鲜民众的激进示威游行遭到日本人的血腥镇压，充分说明了这一点；回顾1925年的历史，日本分析家青柳纲太郎指出：“几乎所有受过教育的朝鲜人，即使是那些日语流利的人——甚至是那些在日本留学的人——都拒绝接受日本的统治。” ⁶⁹

This was having its effect when the Second World War placed the whole empire in jeopardy. It is estimated that in 1942 62 per cent of the Taiwanese population could understand Japanese, and 20 per cent of the Korean.⁶⁸ But when it first took control of Taiwan in 1895, Japan had elected to follow characteristic French, rather than British, advice and aim at total integration of the territory into Japan.^* This policy had then been followed, essentially without debate, as the other colonies were taken. Over the early twentieth century, this counsel proved disastrous in the large developed colonies, especially in Korea: the emperor’s new subjects were never sufficiently trusted to allow them to contribute directly to policy-making in Tokyo, but they had no means to assert at least partial control of their fate locally. This became abundantly clear in the militant demonstrations by Koreans in 1919, bloodily put down by the Japanese; looking back in 1925, the Japanese analyst Aoyagi Tsunataro noted: ‘nearly all educated Koreans, even those who were fluent in Japanese—even those who had studied in Japan—rejected Japanese rule’.⁶⁹

统治者们逐渐接受了这样一种略带讽刺意味的观点：对韩国人来说，“接受教育就意味着反日”。1929年至1930年间，韩国学生再次发起罢课，抗议日本人自以为是的优越感。在台湾，尽管教育日益受到日本的影响，但骚乱较少，民众的怨恨情绪似乎也较低。台湾于1922年将汉语学习改为选修课，并于1937年彻底取消；讽刺的是，在韩国的学校里，汉语学习——以及韩语——却仍然保留在课程中。

It became wryly accepted among the rulers that for Koreans, ‘to be educated was to be anti-Japanese’. A fresh rash of Korean student strikes, against Japanese assumed superiority, occurred in 1929-30. There was less trouble, and apparently less resentment, in Taiwan, even as their education became increasingly Japanese. Chinese studies were made optional there in 1922, and dropped in 1937; ironically, they continued on the curriculum—along with Korean—in the schools of Korea.

与此同时，密克罗尼西亚由于没有发达的识字传统，不会被日本人抹杀，因此更容易接受新的教育方式。此外，当地五万土著居民很快又迎来了数量相当的日本移民，他们前来种植甘蔗。种植园在20世纪20年代建立起来；到30年代初，种植园收入占当地政府财政收入的60%以上。如果不是太平洋战争，密克罗尼西亚很可能至今仍以日语为主要语言^。

Meanwhile Micronesia, with no tradition of developed literacy to be effaced by the Japanese, was far more receptive to the new education. Moreover, its 50,000 indigenous population were rapidly joined by an equal number of Japanese settlers, arriving to grow sugar. Plantations were established in the 1920s; by the early 1930s they accounted for over 60 per cent of government revenues there. If it had not been for the Pacific war, it is probable that Micronesia would have been overwhelmingly Japanese-speaking to this day.^*

然而，日本的“亚洲共荣圈”帝国计划，以及由此延伸的日语传播计划，却因军国主义者的政治胜利以及他们兴高采烈地将日本卷入的太平洋战争而彻底破灭。日本军队在东亚和东南亚的最后蹂躏，彻底摧毁了其通过五十年（相对）和平的殖民统治所赢得的人心。尽管日本曾短暂地占领了整个西太平洋沿岸，但到1945年底，它仍然被限制在1868年控制的岛屿范围内，甚至失去了北部的千岛群岛和南部的琉球群岛。台湾回归中国，朝鲜获得独立。人口稀少的库页岛和密克罗尼西亚分别被置于苏联和美国的统治之下。日本在其来之不易的殖民地中，没有一个地方允许日本政府继续存在；650万日本人被遣返回国。日本在亚洲和太平洋地区的影响力被迫中断了整整十五年。

However, Japan’s Imperial Plans for its Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and by implication for the spread of the Japanese language, were decisively disrupted by the political triumph of militarists, and the Pacific war into which they joyfully led Japan. Any hearts and minds that may have been won through fifty years of (relatively) peaceful colonialism were definitively lost in the terminal rampages of the Japanese army through East and South-East Asia. Although they briefly gained the whole western littoral of the Pacific Ocean, Japan ended 1945 confined to the islands it had controlled in 1868, even losing the outlying Kuriles in the north and the Ryukyus in the south. Taiwan was returned to Chinese rule, and Korea became independent. The more scarcely populated Sakhalin and Micronesia were placed under Russian and American control respectively. Nowhere in their hard-won colonies was a Japanese administration permitted to remain; and 6.5 million Japanese were repatriated to Japan. There was a forced intermission of all Japanese influence in Asia and the Pacific for a good fifteen years.

那么，在日本被驱逐半个世纪后，日本海外语言社群如今还剩下什么呢？许多曾在日本学校就读的几代人仍然能够用日语交流。但即便在这一代人中，日语似乎也很少被用作沟通工具：日本人所招致的耻辱持续了太久，以至于当日本工业利益开始再次扩张时，这种耻辱阻碍了他们利用这一文化遗产。在²⁰世纪最后四十年里，昔日的日本帝国丝毫没有成为日本产品乃至日本文化走向全球的跳板。

What, then, remains of the Japanese overseas language community, half a century after Japan’s expulsion? Many who survive from the generations that attended Japanese schools can still converse in the language. But it seems that it is hardly used as a means of communication, even among this generation:⁷⁰ the opprobrium that the Japanese had stirred up lasted so long that it prevented any advantage being taken of this heritage when Japanese industrial interests began to spread again. The old Japanese empire has in no way served as a launch-pad for the global spread of Japanese products, and latterly of Japanese culture, in the last four decades of the twentieth century.

日本五十年的语言传播历程，可以看作是帝国语言发展历程的一个缩影。与其他殖民帝国一样，日本利用其在技术和军事上的优势——在本例中指的是其近邻——扩张领土。随后，它面临着如何安置当地土著居民的问题，这些人并不认同自己是日本人。日本试图在各地将他们转化为自身社会的一员，当然，它并不相信他们会自愿加入，但却非常重视日语教育。然而，正如其他地方一样，这种转化过程最终失败了。

Japan’s fifty years of language spread can be seen as a demonstration in miniature of the career of an imperial language. Like the other colonial empires, Japan took advantage of its technical and military superiority over other countries—in this case, its close neighbours—to increase its territory. It then faced the problem of what to do with the native populations there, people who did not think of themselves as Japanese. It attempted everywhere to convert them into members of its own community, certainly not trusting them to associate themselves voluntarily, but setting considerable store by education in the Japanese language. As everywhere else, this conversion process failed.

语言的传播取得了一定的成功，但一旦使用这种语言的政治动机消失，它便失去了自身的生命力。用来解释俄语衰落的框架同样适用于此。由于几乎所有海外侨民都已回国，克里奥尔语的传播动机也随之消失。人们既没有对旭日旗下的生活怀念，也没有维护与日本人团结的愿望。事实上，日本统治时期留下的痛苦记忆如此深刻，以至于即使存在通过语言重建经济联系的全球化理由，这些理由也被忽视了。事实证明，语言的永久传播并非通过计划或武力就能实现的。

There was reasonable success in spreading the language, but once the political motive for using it was gone, the language turned out to have no independent staying power. The framework suggested to explain the decline of Russian can be applied here too. The creole motive was absent, since essentially the whole overseas population had been repatriated. There was no nostalgia for life under the flag of the Rising Sun, nor any wish to preserve unity with its speakers. Indeed, the bitter memories that the few years of Japan’s control had caused were such that even when there were globalisation reasons to renew economic links through the language, they were disregarded. Permanent language spread, it turns out, is not to be achieved through planning, or naked force.

^卡蒙斯是葡萄牙文学的泰斗，他的巨著颂扬了葡萄牙航海家的丰功伟绩。 “卢西阿达斯”（Lusiadas ）这个名字虽然让人联想到《伊利亚特》，但实际上是“葡萄牙人”的学术对应词，意指卢苏斯（Lusus）的后裔，卢苏斯是居住在（罗马）卢西塔尼亚的民族的神话创始人。这部作品大部分是在果阿写成的，因此它既是远洋航行的产物，也是对远洋航行的颂扬。该书于1572年出版。

^* Camões is the doyen of Portuguese literature, and his great work celebrates the achievements of the Portuguese mariners. The name Lusiadas, although it recalls ‘Iliad’, is actually a learned equivalent for ‘the Portuguese’, meaning the progeny of Lusus, the mythical founder of the race who lived in (Roman) Lusitania. The work was actually written, for the most part, in Goa, so it is a product of Ultramar, as well as a celebration of it. It was published in 1572.

^* “父亲，是什么让您从印度远道而来？”据其《印度之旅》记载，引自洛佩斯（1936：33-5）。

^* ‘Father, what has brought you to this land so far from India?’ Reported in his Itinerario da Índia por terra, quoted in Lopes (1936: 33-5).

^†现位于霍尔木兹海峡的霍梅尼港。

^† Now Bandar Khomeini, on the Straits of Hormuz.

^*它成为印度群岛的默认欧洲语言，而且显然在西爪哇的普雷安格地区，甚至荷兰语也被俗称为basa Perteges——这是一个有趣的语言误称的混合，其中basa源自马来语bahasa，而 bahasa 又源自梵语bhā⋅ā， Perteges则是葡萄牙语的讹误（据 Lopes 1936 年报道：viii）。

^* It became the default European language in the Indies, and apparently in western Java, in the region of Preanger, even Dutch was known popularly as basa Perteges—an interesting conflation of language misnomers, with basa, through Malay bahasa, from Sanskrit bhā⋅ā, and Perteges a corruption of Portugues (reported in Lopes 1936: viii).

^*与英语方言相比，印度葡萄牙语的发音类似于苏格兰语中“Edinburgh”一词的“E”，而标准葡萄牙语的发音更像是伦敦东区方言中“mate”一词的“a”。

^* To compare with English dialects, Indo-Portuguese makes it like the E in a refined Scots pronunciation of ‘Edinburgh’, standard Portuguese more like the a in Cockney ‘mate’.

^†即便如此，2000 年，该邦的官方语言被宣布为孔卡尼语，这是一种与马拉地语和印地语相关的雅利安语。

^† Even so, in 2000 the state’s official language was declared to be Konkani, an Aryan language related to Marathi and Hindi.

^*这是启蒙运动对天主教政府的全球影响的一部分（参见第 10 章“国家的解决之道：西班牙化”，第 374 页）。

^* This was part of the global impact of the Enlightenment on Catholic governments (see Chapter 10, ‘The state’s solution: Hispanización’, p. 374).

^{苏门答腊的巨}港是室利佛逝（Śrī Vijaya）的主要城市，室利佛逝是古代的一个国家，很可能是马来语在东印度群岛市场传播的罪魁祸首。这句关于徒劳努力的谚语据说是指荷兰人试图占领巨港的失败尝试，巨港在当时是胡椒的主要产地（Hamilton 1987: 60）。

^* Palembang in Sumatra was the principal city of Śrī Vijaya, the ancient state that was most likely responsible for the spread of Malay round the markets of the East Indies. This proverbial statement of wasted effort is said to refer to a failed Dutch attempt to take Palembang, in their day a prime source of pepper (Hamilton 1987: 60).

^* 17 世纪，每个国家的人口都在 125 万到 150 万之间（Boxer 1969：114）。

^* Each country had between 1.25 and 1.5 million people in the seventeenth century (Boxer 1969: 114).

^巴塔维人是生活在公元前1世纪末至公元1世纪初，位于今荷兰斯海尔德河以北地区的日耳曼部落。因此，对于具有历史意识的荷兰人来说，他们提供了一个有用的古典化别名，但或许他们定居的爪哇人对此并不领情。

^* The Batavi were a Germanic tribe who had lived in the area of modern Holland, north of the Scheldt, around the turn of the first centuries BC-AD. They thus provided a useful classical pseudonym for historically minded Dutchmen, perhaps little appreciated by the Javanese among whom they settled.

^†一个主要原因是葡萄牙人与基督教的联系，而德川家光领导的日本政府决心在日本境内根除基督教。因此，荷兰人只愿将关注点限制在世俗的贸易事务上，在接下来的两个世纪里，他们成为日本唯一的外国接触对象。

^† A major motive was the association of the Portuguese with Christianity, which the Japanese government of Tokugawa Iemitsu was determined to stamp out within their shores. The Dutch, prepared to restrict their concerns to secular matters of trade, were therefore the only foreign contact of the Japanese for the following two centuries.

这导致了日本历史上一个著名的语言事件（类似于上文提到的葡萄牙语的使用，[《亚洲帝国》，第388页]）。1853年，当美国海军准将佩里率领他的“黑船”进入浦贺港，决心结束日本的锁国状态时，第一批上岸的日本人之一堀辰之助用一口流利的英语说道：“我会说荷兰语。”由于一位名叫波特曼的美国人也懂荷兰语，因此，美国人和日本人之间的第一次持续交流实际上是用荷兰语进行的。（霍克斯，1954年，第48-49页）

This led to a famous linguistic incident in Japanese history (comparable to the use of Portuguese mentioned above, [’An Asian empire’, p. 388]). In 1853, when the American Commodore Perry entered the port of Uraga with his ‘black ships’, determined to end Japan’s isolation, one of the first Japanese to come alongside, Hori Tatsunosuke, said in very good English, ‘I can speak Dutch.’ Since one of the Americans, a Mr Portman, also knew the language, the first sustained exchange between an American and a Japanese actually took place in Dutch. (Hawks 1954, pp. 48-9)

^* 1795 年法国革命占领荷兰时，他们最初介入是为了先发制人地控制荷兰的殖民地，但在 1806 年永久吞并了开普殖民地。

^* They originally stepped in to take pre-emptive control of Dutch possessions when revolutionary France occupied the Netherlands in 1795, but permanently annexed the Cape colony in 1806.

^安德森（1991：110）提出了另外两个动机：一是十七世纪初民族主义的缺失（毕竟荷兰东印度公司是一个公司，而非一个民族），二是荷兰人对自己语言缺乏自信。这两个理由似乎都不太令人信服，尤其与荷兰人有意超越的葡萄牙竞争对手相比更是如此。他在第133页进一步指出，荷兰当时只有一个规模较大的殖民地，因此可以负担得起采用非欧洲语言进行行政管理：他认为，对于像英国这样的跨大陆帝国来说，这样做是不可行的。但荷兰帝国在其建立后的前150年里，也同样是一个跨大陆的帝国。

^* Anderson (1991: 110) suggests two other motives: the absence of nationalism as such in the early seventeenth century (the VOC was after all a corporation, not a nationality), and Dutch lack of self-confidence in their own language. Neither seems particularly convincing, especially in comparison with the Portuguese competitors whom the Dutch were quite consciously outdoing. On p. 133, he suggests further that the Netherlands, with only one substantial colony, could afford to adopt a non-European language for administration: it would have been unworkable, he says, for a multi-continental empire such as the British. But the Dutch empire too, for its first 150 years, had been just as multi-continental.

另一方面，他指出（第 110 页）语言政策是使土著人口发展滞后的手段，这或许是正确的：“1940 年，土著人口超过 7000 万，但只有 637 名‘土著’在上大学，只有 37 人获得了学士学位。”

On the other hand, he may be right in pointing (p. 110) to the language policy as a means of keeping the native population underdeveloped: ‘in 1940, when the indigenous population numbered well over 70 millions, there were only 637 “natives” in college, and only 37 graduated with BAs.’

^* 1521 年，意大利人皮加费塔随西班牙环球航行者来到摩鹿加群岛的蒂多雷，并在此地收集了 450 个马来语单词。然而，马来语在当地尚未普及：“即使是 1521 年和 1522 年为蒂多雷幼苏丹抄写马来语的抄写员也表明，他们对马来语的了解‘肯定非常有限’”（霍夫曼 1979：66-7，注 9）。

^* The Italian Pigafetta, accompanying the Spanish circumnavigators in 1521, had been able to compile a list of 450 Malay words at Tidore in the Moluccas. Nevertheless, it was not yet well established there: ‘even the scribes who had to write it for the infant Sultan of Tidore in 1521 and 1522 showed that they were “certainly very imperfectly acquainted with it’” (Hoffman 1979: 66-7, n. 9).

人们一直猜测，荷兰人不愿意与殖民地臣民分享他们的语言，是一种势利眼，目的是为了提升他们在没有荷兰血统的土著居民中的威望。荷兰当局强烈反对这种观点，认为它有害。然而，许多外国观察家（例如 Bousquet 1940: 88-9）都持有这种观点；而且，这恰好与爪哇礼仪的某些方面相吻合，在爪哇，语言风格（taalsoorten）是社会地位的^标志。

^* There was always speculation that the strange unwillingness of the Dutch to share their language with their colonial subjects was a sort of snobbery, to enhance their prestige among the Dutchless natives. This was roundly discouraged by the Dutch administration as a harmful attitude. Nevertheless, it was widely believed by foreign observers (e.g. Bousquet 1940: 88-9); and it did happen to fit in with a certain aspect of Javanese etiquette, whereby social status was marked by styles of language (taalsoorten).

^*甚至在一位不认同的盎格鲁-撒克逊人看来，这或许是“那种醉醺醺的、欣快的散文诗的一个例子，这是法国精神最令人厌烦的表现形式之一”，这是彼得·梅达沃在评论德日进的《人类现象》（可在<http://cscs.umich.edu/-crshalizi/Medawar/phenomenon-of-man.html>访问）时所说的一句话。

^* It might even be seen, by an unsympathetic Anglo-Saxon, as an example of ‘that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit’, a phrase of Peter Medawar in a review of Teilhard de Chardin’s Le Phénomène humain (accessible at <http://cscs.umich.edu/-crshalizi/Medawar/phenomenon-of-man.html>).

^* “法语国家”一词由地理学家奥内西姆·雷克吕于1880年创造，用来指代世界上的法语国家群体。如今，至少在法语世界，它通常指根据宪章自愿结成的国家联盟，这些国家并非全部都是法国的前殖民地，其精神与英联邦颇为相似。（参见<www.france.diplomatie.fr/francophonie>。）

^* The term was invented by the geographer Onésime Reclus in 1880, to refer to the French-speaking community in the world. Nowadays, at least in the French-speaking world, it refers preferably to a voluntary association of states under a charter, not all of them ex-colonies of France, in spirit rather comparable with the British Commonwealth. (See <www.france.diplomatie.fr/francophonie>.)

^†这些数据来自 Grimes (2000)。法国外交部法语国家组织网站称，法语作为第一语言和第二语言的使用者有 1.6 亿。Leclerc (2000) 指出，有 1.45 亿人曾接受过法语教育。这两个数字都可能使法语的排名超过德语，但达不到葡萄牙语的水平。

^† These figures are from Grimes (2000). The French Foreign Ministry’s francophonie website claims that there are 160 million first-language and second-language speakers. Leclerc (2000) states that 145 million people have been to school in French. Either figure might lift its rank above German, but not to the level of Portuguese.

^* Je是拉丁语中表示强调的代词ego的残余（在变成类似eieu的东西之后被粗暴地简化了——参见普罗旺斯语的对应词eu, ieu）。

^* Je is a remnant of what was once a Latin pronoun of emphasis, ego (brutally reduced, after changing to something like eieu—cf. the Provençal equivalent, eu, ieu).

^*下一章将从受益于法语衰落的语言的角度，对法语的这种衰落进行更多论述。

^* There will be more to say of this retreat of French, from the viewpoint of the language that benefited from it, in the next chapter.

^†该术语和制度在地中海地区一直延续到十九世纪，但实际使用的语言不是法语而是意大利语，这可能是由于后来威尼斯商人的影响。

^† The term, and the institution, continued in the Mediterranean until the nineteenth century, but the actual language used was based not on French but Italian, probably because of the later influence of merchants from Venice.

^{阿基坦的埃莉诺}（1122-1204）是一位举足轻重的文化赞助人。她出身名门，是两位国王的妻子，两位孩子的母亲，以及两位孩子的婆婆，在社会上拥有极其广泛的人脉。但在十二世纪中叶，她将位于普瓦捷的宫廷打造成了宫廷爱情诗歌和历史叙事的中心。

^§ Eleanor (Aliénor) of Aquitaine (1122-1204) played a cardinal role as a cultural sponsor. She could hardly have been better connected in society, being the wife of two kings, mother of two, and the mother-in-law of yet two more. But in the mid-twelfth century she made her court at Poitiers a centre for courtly love poetry and historical narrative.

^此后，它一直受到法国政府最高层的赞助，仅在 1793-1803 年法国大革命期间中断过。它的首要任务是编纂词典；第一版历时近六十年才于 1694 年出版，但此后一直定期更新，最新版本（第八版）于 1992 年出版。

^* It has continued to enjoy the sponsorship of the highest level in French government ever since, broken only during the Revolution in 1793-1803. Its first task was to compile a dictionary; the first edition took almost sixty years, coming out in 1694, but it has been updated periodically ever since, the latest edition, the eighth, appearing in 1992.

^*因此，安托万·德·里瓦罗尔 (Antoine de Rivarol)在 1784 年的《法语世界论》中说了一句妙语： “Ce qui n'est pas clair n'est pas français!”（“不清楚的就不是法语！”），

^* Hence the bon mot of Antoine de Rivarol, in his Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française, of 1784: ’Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français!’ (’What is not clear is not French!’),

^† 'Eh bien，我的王子，Gěnes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des, de la famille Buonaparte.非。 je vous previens, que si vous ne me dites pas, que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j' y crois)—je ne vous connais plus, vous n'ětes plus mon ami, vous n'ětes plus, comme vous dites.'

^† ’Eh bien, mon prince, Gěnes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des, de la famille Buonaparte. Non. je vous préviens, que si vous ne me dites pas, que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j’ y crois)—je ne vous connais plus, vous n’ětes plus mon ami, vous n’ětes plus, comme vous dites.’

^*十八世纪，它只败给了西班牙；二十世纪，它只败给了英国。

^* In the eighteenth century, it yielded only to Spain; in the twentieth, only to Britain.

^*关于阿尔及利亚法语人口的估计数字差异很大，从《民族语》中几乎荒谬的11万人（该国总人口为3000万）到占总人口25%（即750万人）不等。许多人认为，阿尔及利亚仍然是世界上第二大法语人口国家，超过了魁北克（670万人）和比利时（400万人）。（后两个数字也来自《民族语》 ——Grimes 2000。）人们普遍认为，自1962年以来，阿尔及利亚政府试图推行的“阿拉伯化”政策反而增加了其他语言的使用，尤其是柏柏尔语和法语；但目前尚无相关调查数据。

^* Estimates of the French-speaking population of Algeria vary from the Ethnologue’s almost absurdly low 110,000 (out of a population of 30 million) to 25 per cent of the population (i.e. 7.5 million). Many believe that it is still the second-largest francophone population in the world, ahead of Quebec with 6.7 million, and Belgium with 4 million. (These latter figures also come from the Ethnologue—Grimes 2000.) It is widely believed that the Algerian government’s attempted ‘arabisation’ since 1962 has perversely increased use of other languages, notably Berber and French; but no survey data is available.

^†他访问魁北克市附近的一个村庄被称为ganāda，在休伦语中意为“定居点”，休伦语是沿河地区的通用语。这就是加拿大名称的由来。

^† One village he visited near Quebec City was known as ganāda, ‘settlement’ in the Huron language, which served as lingua franca along the river. This is the origin of the name Canada.

尽管当时并未在越南建立任何法国定居点，但传教事业蓬勃发展；事实上，德·罗德斯是耶稣会团队中唯一的法国人，该团队由六名欧洲人和一名日本人组成。^然而

，保护传教团的必要性后来被用来为1859年法国大规模入侵印度支那辩护。德·罗德斯本人也意义非凡，他设计了如今被称为“（越南语为Quôc-ngu）的文字，该文字使用罗马字母和重音符号。他最初设计这种文字是为了帮助外国传教士学习越南语。但在19世纪末，这种文字被广泛接受，甚至被民族主义者所接受，被视为普及识字的关键，如今已在越南普遍使用。

^* The mission flourished, although it did not lead to any French settlement at the time; indeed, de Rhodes was the only Frenchman in a Jesuit team consisting of six Europeans and a Japanese.

However, the need to protect the missions was later used to justify the massive French invasion of Indo-china which came in 1859. And de Rhodes himself is significant as the man who devised the script now known as Quôc-ngu (, ‘National Language’), using Roman letters and accents. He had designed it as an aid to foreign missionaries learning Vietnamese. But in the late nineteenth century it was taken up, even by nationalists, as the key to mass literacy, and is now used universally in Vietnam.

^贫苦的阿卡迪亚人沦为列强政治的牺牲品。1713年，根据《乌得勒支条约》，他们的土地被割让给英国，换取了在印度的贸易特权。随后，他们被迫流散到沿海地区，尤其是在缅因州和密西西比河口（在那里他们被称为“卡真人”），一些人迁往安的列斯群岛，还有许多人返回沿海省份。无论他们走到哪里，法语社区都会出现，至少在一段时间内如此。

^* The poor Acadians were to fall victim to great power politics, their lands traded to England under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 in return for trading concessions in India. They were subsequently scattered along the coast, especially in Maine and the mouths of the Mississippi (where they became known as ‘Cajuns’), some in the Antilles and many back to the maritime provinces. Wherever they went, French-speaking communities sprang up, at least for a time.

^*这不太可能是根本原因，因为二十年后，正是法国的海军力量从根本上阻止了英国人进入美洲，当时英国正试图保住自己的殖民地。

^* This can hardly have been a fundamental cause, since two decades later it was French naval power which crucially denied the British access to America when they were trying to hold on to their own colonies.

^†法国人很满意地将凡尔赛宫作为 1783 年会议的举办地，该会议使英国失去了美洲殖民地，而就在 20 年前的巴黎会议，英国人从法国手中夺取了新法兰西。

^† The French had the satisfaction of providing Versailles as the site for the 1783 conference that divested Britain of its American colonies, just twenty years after the Paris conference when the British had taken Nouvelle-France from them.

^§这些数据来自法国资料，Leclerc (2001, <HISTfrQC s2 Britannique.htm<)。这些数据与一些英国数据存在惊人的差异：例如，Mackey (1998) 指出，有 10 万名效忠派人士加入了当时已有的 6.5 万法国人和 9000 名英国人组成的群体。

^§ These figures are drawn from a French source, Leclerc (2001, <HISTfrQC s2 Britannique.htm<). There is amazing discrepancy with some English figures: e.g., Mackey (1998) says that 100,000 loyalists joined an existing population of 65,000 French and 9000 English.

^卡宴建于1643年，由于加勒比海地区盛产糖，它一直是科尔伯特系统殖民计划的一部分。法国大革命后，卡宴曾短暂地被用作政治犯流放地（1794-1805年）。1848年法国废除奴隶制后，卡宴的经济一蹶不振，此后主要以其监狱营地——魔鬼岛而闻名，该营地从1852年运营至1946年。

^* Cayenne was founded in 1643 and with Caribbean sugar aplenty had been part of Colbert’s plans for systematic colonisation. It was briefly used after the French Revolution as a place of exile for political prisoners (1794-1805). It never recovered economically from France’s abolition of slavery in 1848, and thereafter was famous mainly for its prison camp, Devil’s Island, in operation from 1852 to 1946.

^†巧合的是，在拿破仑三世统治时期（1852-1870 年），该政权甚至被称为第二帝国。

^† By a happy coincidence, during the reign of Napoleon III, 1852-70, the regime was even known as le second Empire.

^比利时人由于更加依赖外国专家来治理帝国，因此较少使用法语作为行政管理的通用语言。与英国殖民地一样，当时普遍使用各种已有的通用语，尤其是斯瓦希里语和林加拉语。

^* The Belgians, relying much more on foreign expertise to run their empire, also made less use of French as a pervasive language of administration. As in the British colonies, there was widespread use of any pre-existing lingua franca, notably Swahili and Lingala.

^*宪法第2条： “la langue de la République est le français”。随后，该规定由 1994 年 8 月 4 日法律“la langue de l' enseignement est le français”（在《教育法》第 L. 121-3 条中实施）生效。

^* Article 2 of the constitution: ’la langue de la République est le français’. This is then given effect by the law of 4 August 1994, ’la langue de l’ enseignement est le français’ (implemented in article L. 121-3 of the Code de l’Éducation).

^†在我们的俄语罗马化拼写中， y 的发音与英语单词yet中的y相同（通常作为上标附加在辅音之后，表示它是腭化的）； ï代表一个标准英语中不存在的元音：它类似于元音 i，但舌体向后缩，例如在苏格兰语单词dirk 的发音中可以听到这种发音； ë 的发音与西里尔字母拼写相同，发音为yo，如 yob 中的 yo。重音符号 ' 表示重读，而o在非重读时听起来更像a。在古俄语中，该字母被转写为 ė，因为它似乎代表一个更闭的 e 音，类似于爱丁堡 (Edinburgh) 当地发音中的E ，或法语单词 été 中的é 。

^† In our Romanisation of Russian, y has the value of English y in yet (often attached as a superscript to a consonant, showing that it is palatalised); ï represents a vowel not known in standard English: it is like the vowel i with the body of the tongue drawn back, which can be heard for instance in the Scottish pronunciation of the word dirk; ë, as in Cyrillic spelling, is pronounced yo as in ‘yob’. The acute accent, ’, marks a heavy stress, and o when it is not stressed sounds more like a. In older Russian, the letter is transcribed ė, since it seems to have represented a more closed e sound, like E in the local pronunciation of ‘Edinburgh’, or é in French été.

^*这个名称是Rus ^y的拉丁化形式，最早出现于九世纪。它的起源尚不明确（Franklin 和 Shepard 1996: 27-32 对此有所讨论）。但芬兰语中瑞典人的称呼是Ruotsi（可能最初意为“划桨者”）；而该词最早的记录使用（源自希腊语Rhōs）是《贝尔蒂尼安编年史》中对 839 年访问法兰克宫廷的记载，其中提到“一些人自称 Rhos，他们的国王，被称为chacanus（即 khagan，一个突厥语头衔！），派遣了他们……皇帝（路易——斯特拉斯堡誓言的缔结者；参见第八章）……发现他们是瑞典人。”但同时期的阿拉伯文献《路线与王国之书》（约846 年）告诉我们：“罗斯人是斯拉夫人的一个部落。”^{他们带来了海狸皮和黑狐皮……’（Milner-Gulland 1997: 53-5）。此外，还有一条名为罗西河的}小河，它在基辅以南汇入第聂伯河。

^* The name is a Latinisation of Rus^y, first heard of in the ninth century. Its origins are obscure (and discussed in Franklin and Shepard 1996: 27-32). But the Finnish name for Swedes is Ruotsi (perhaps originally meaning ‘oarsmen’); and the first recorded use of the term (as Rhōs, through Greek) is the Bertinian Annals’ account of a visit to a Frankish court in 839, of ‘certain men who said they were called Rhos, and that their king, known as chacanus [i.e. khagan - a Turkic title!] had despatched them… The Emperor [Louis—he of the Strasburg Oaths; see Chapter 8]… discovered that they were Swedes by origin.’ But a contemporary source, the Arabic Book of Routes and Kingdoms (c.846), tells us: ‘The Rūs are a tribe of Slavs. They bring furs of beavers and black foxes…’ (Milner-Gulland 1997: 53-5). There is also a small river called the Ros^y, which flows into the Dnieper just south of Kiev.

^*俄语中“东正教”一词pravoslavnïi是从希腊语借译而来。但值得注意的是，这个词也可以被解读为“真正的斯拉夫人”或“真正荣耀的”。

^* The Russian for Orthodox, pravoslavnïi, is a loan translation from the Greek. But tellingly, this word could as well be analysed to mean ‘truly Slav’ or indeed ‘rightly glorious’.

^† Barraclough (1978: 209, 230)。二十世纪初，大量人口涌入土耳其斯坦，有时甚至引发当地居民大规模东迁至中国（Hosking 1997: 389-90）。后来，尤其是在斯大林统治时期，这些人口流动因蓄意的大规模强制驱逐而加剧，表面上是为了安全，这让人想起亚述帝国的提格拉特帕拉沙尔及其继任者（参见第三章“阿卡德语——世界领先的技术：识字模式”，第64页）。但当时被驱逐到哈萨克斯坦和西伯利亚的人口通常讲的语言并非俄语：来自克里米亚的20万讲突厥语的鞑靼人，以及来自伏尔加河的180万德意志人。一些民族，如车臣-印古什人、卡巴尔达-巴尔卡尔人和卡尔梅克人，后来被允许返回家园。但即使在今天，现代乌兹别克斯坦和哈萨克斯坦仍然有 30 万朝鲜人（Dalby 1998: 616, 223, 329; Comrie 1981: 30）。

^† Barraclough (1978: 209, 230). In the early twentieth century there were substantial flows into Turkestan too, sometimes provoking large-scale departures of the locals eastward into China (Hosking 1997: 389-90). Later on, especially under Stalin, these flows were augmented by deliberate enforced deportations en masse, ostensibly for security, reminiscent of Tiglath Pileser and his successors in the Assyrian empire (see Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 64). But the populations then deported into Kazakhstan and Siberia typically spoke languages other than Russian: 200,000 Turkic-speaking Tatars from the Crimea, 1.8 million Germans from the Volga. Some, like the Chechen-Ingush, Kabard-Balkar and Kalmyk, were later allowed to return. But there are even now 300,000 Koreans in modern Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (Dalby 1998: 616, 223, 329; Comrie 1981: 30).

^*比较一下英式英语中 t 和 d 的变化： tune和dune这两个词在标准发音中分别发音为 [t^y ūn] 和 [d^y ūn]，但在日常发音中则变为塞擦音 [tšūn] 和 [dzucar;ūn]。

^* Compare what happens to t and d in British English before long u: the words tune and dune are pronounced [t^yūn] and [d^yūn] in careful speech, but affricated to [tšūn] and [dzucar;ūn] in everyday pronunciation.

^*亚速海和黑海之间的海峡上的一座瓦良格要塞：显然，猎鹰们试图开辟一条通往基辅以东很远的地方的道路。

^* A Varangian fortress on the strait between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea: evidently the falcons were trying to beat a path far to the east of Kiev.

^*古老的头衔knyaz ^y，意为“王子”，同样也是借用西方的词汇：它是古日耳曼语头衔kuningas（字面意思是“出生的人”）的俄语变体，而 kuningas 也是英语 king 的词源。

^* The old title knyaz^y, ‘prince’, is likewise a borrowing of a Western term: it is the Russian reworking of the old Germanic title kuningas, literally ‘man of birth’, which is also the origin of English king.

^† Kozak（在克里米亚鞑靼语、察合台突厥语中）意为“自由人、流浪者、强盗”。在其他突厥语族语言（例如吉尔吉斯语、阿塞拜疆语、巴什基尔语）中， kazak、qazaq等词有“独立之人”或“冒险家”等含义。所有这些词都源自古突厥语动词kez-，意为“行走、漫游、旅行”。

^† Kozak (in Crimean Tatar, Chagatay Turkic) means ‘free man, wanderer, bandit’. In other Turkic languages (e.g. Kïrgïz, Azeri, Bashkir) the word kazak, qazaq has meanings such as ‘independent man’ or ‘seeker of adventures’. All are derived from old the Turkic verb kez-, ‘walk, wander, travel’.

^当然，这些并非中欧仅有的斯拉夫语族群。但其他斯拉夫语族群，包括温德人、捷克人、斯洛伐克人、斯洛文尼亚人、塞尔维亚人、波斯尼亚人和克罗地亚人，都无法被纳入早期现代俄罗斯的版图。他们的语言，如同波兰语一样，与俄语无法互通；而且他们的人民也被牢牢地控制在其他帝国的疆域之内。

^* These of course were not the only Slavic-language groups of central Europe. But the others, among them the Wends, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenians, Serbs, Bosnians and Croats, were never available for incorporation into early modern Russia. Their languages, like Polish, were not mutually intelligible with Russian; and their peoples were firmly held within the bounds of other empires.

^*在 1897 年的人口普查中，乌克兰人占 18%，其余俄罗斯人占 44%。

^* In the census of 1897, the Ukrainians would constitute 18 per cent, the rest of the Russians 44 per cent.

^*很久以后，在 1944 年，在纳粹对该地区犯下暴行之后，斯大林将剩余的 19 万克里米亚鞑靼人集体驱逐到中亚。20 世纪 90 年代，其中约有 5 万人返回（Dalby 1998：616）。

^* Much later, in 1944, after Nazi atrocities in the region, Stalin deported the remaining 190,000 Crimean Tatars en masse to central Asia. In the 1990s about 50,000 of them returned (Dalby 1998: 616).

^* “哈萨克”一词与“哥萨克”一词具有相同的突厥语词源；但在这里，它指的是一个真正的突厥游牧部落，与吉尔吉斯人关系密切。

^* The word Kazakh has the same Turkic etymology as Cossack; but here it refers to a real Turkic tribe of nomads, closely related to the Kyrgyz.

^事实上，《圣经》在俄语版问世半个世纪之前，就已经有了卡尔梅克语和鞑靼语版本（更不用说芬兰语、爱沙尼亚语、拉脱维亚语、立陶宛语、波兰语、亚美尼亚语和格鲁吉亚语版本了）。俄语版《圣经》的出版直到1876年才获得授权，而巧合的是，这恰好发生在卡尔·马克思的《资本论》俄语版第一版之后（Hosking 1997: 138-42, 233-4）。

^* The Bible was actually available in Kalmyk and Tatar (not to mention Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Armenian and Georgian) half a century before it came out in Russian. Publication of the Russian Bible could not be authorised until 1876, by chance just after the first Russian edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (Hosking 1997: 138-42, 233-4).

^* 1994年，爱沙尼亚有436,600名俄罗斯人，占总人口的29.0%；拉脱维亚有849,000名俄罗斯人，占总人口的33.1%。与此同时，立陶宛的俄罗斯人口为316,000人，仅占总人口的8.5%（《欧洲世界年鉴》，1995年）。

^* In 1994, there were 436,600 Russians in Estonia, comprising 29.0 per cent of the total population; in Latvia, there were 849,000, 33.1 per cent. Meanwhile, in Lithuania, the Russian population stood at 316,000, just 8.5 per cent (Europa World Yearbook, 1995).

^† 1995年5月的全民公投赋予俄语和白俄罗斯语共同的官方语言地位。俄语是白俄罗斯几乎所有大学院系的教学语言。1994年，首都明斯克有220所学校使用白俄罗斯语授课，而两年后，使用白俄罗斯语授课的学校不足20所。

^† A May 1995 referendum granted Russian the status of an official language, along with Belarusian. Russian is the language of instruction in virtually all university departments in Belarus. And whereas in 1994 220 schools in Minsk, the capital city, had taught in Belarusian, two years later under twenty did so.

^尽管代价高昂，但象征意义却值得商榷，土库曼斯坦、乌兹别克斯坦和阿塞拜疆这三个突厥语系国家在独立后的十年间，都将字母表从西里尔字母改回了拉丁字母。然而，每个国家的字母系统都略有不同，而且没有一个国家采用土耳其1928年制定的拼写规则。

^§ At high cost, but with dubious symbolism, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, speaking Turkic languages, all converted their alphabets back from Cyrillic to Latin in the decade after independence. But each system is a little different, and none has adopted Turkey’s own spelling conventions of 1928.

^另一种日耳曼语——诺尔斯语——在本世纪后几个世纪也被其使用者带到了遥远的地方：诺曼人将其带到了诺曼底，瓦良格人将其带到了罗斯，维京人将其带到了英格兰、苏格兰、爱尔兰和冰岛。除了一个例外，他们几乎在所有地方都放弃了自己的语言，转而使用他们定居地居民的语言：唯一的例外是冰岛，在那里，诺尔斯语定居者发现自己是第一批到达冰岛的人类。

^* Another Germanic language, Norse, was also being taken far afield by its speakers in the latter centuries of this millennium: the Normans took it to Normandy, the Varangians to Rus, the Vikings to England, Scotland, Ireland and Iceland. In every case but one, they gave up their own language for that of the people with whom they settled: the only exception was in Iceland, where the Norse settlers found that they were the first human beings to arrive.

^†在利沃尼亚冰封的佩普斯湖上发生的决定性战役，被谢尔盖·爱森斯坦用电影的形式生动地展现了出来。

^† The decisive battle on a frozen Lake Peipus, in Livonia, was memorably conceived on film by Sergei Eisenstein.

^*这些与其说是日语，不如说是用日语发音的汉字串。但这并没有影响它们的有效性。

^* These are not so much Japanese as strings of Chinese characters in Japanese pronunciation. This did not inhibit their effectiveness.

^当然，日本帝国主义是一股极其不安分的力量，其扩张并未止步于此：日本还曾短暂占领过东西伯利亚的部分地区，远至伊尔库茨克（1918-1922年）、萨哈林岛北部和下阿穆尔河地区（1920-1925年）、满洲（1931-1945年）、中国东北地区（1934-1945年），并在二战期间占领了整个东南亚、东印度群岛、新几内亚、菲律宾和缅甸（1941-1945年间曾多次占领）。但所有这些征服都存在争议，因此都只是暂时的军事统治。只有在较早建立的“正式帝国”中，日本人才有机会真正扎根于当地语言。

^* Of course, Japanese imperialism was an extremely restless force, and did not stop here: for brief periods Japan also held parts of eastern Siberia as far as Irkutsk (1918-22), northern Sakhalin and the Lower Amur (1920-5), Manchuria (1931-45), north-eastern China (1934-45) and then, during the Second World War, the whole of South-East Asia, the East Indies, New Guinea, the Philippines and Burma (for various periods in 1941-5). But all these conquests were disputed, and so held on a temporary, military, basis. It was only in the older ‘formal empire’ that the Japanese had something of a chance to put down linguistic roots.

^{法国的建议来自米歇尔}·吕邦，他认为台湾“即便现在还不是，将来也应该成为日本的一个都道府县”，立即受《帝国宪法》管辖，这一方案令人想起法国对待阿尔及利亚的方式。英国的建议来自蒙塔古·柯克伍德，他建议将台湾视为殖民地，拥有自己的立法委员会，并尽可能多地让台湾人担任立法委员、法官和行政官员。这一建议被否决的原因之一是，日本人和台湾人属于同一民族，使用同一种文字（陈1984：249-51）。

^* The French advice came from Michel Lubon, suggesting that Taiwan should be ‘a prefecture of Japan in future, if not now’, immediately subject to the Imperial Consitution, a solution reminiscent of France’s approach to Algeria. The British advice, from Montague Kirkwood, suggested viewing Taiwan as a colony with its own legislative council, and as many Taiwanese as possible as legislators, judges and administrators. Among other reasons, it was rejected on the grounds that the Japanese and Taiwanese belonged to the same race and used the same script (Chen 1984: 249-51).

^*事实上，这些岛屿成为了美国托管的太平洋岛屿的一部分（于 1986 年获得独立），它们自己的语言仍然占主导地位；1998 年，联合国估计它们的总人口为 114,000 人，其中约有 3,500 人讲英语（Grimes 2000）。

^* As it was, the islands became part of the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (gaining independence in 1986), and their own languages still predominate; in 1998, the UN put their total population at 114,000, with some 3500 English speakers (Grimes 2000).

12

微观世界还是扭曲的镜子？

英语的职业生涯

12

Microcosm or Distorting Mirror?

The Career of English

我们将永不停歇地探索，

而我们所有探索的终点

，将是回到我们出发的地方，

并第一次真正认识这个地方。

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T·S·艾略特，《小吉丁》¹

T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’¹

英语的发展历程，如同世界上大多数主要语言一样，经常被讲述给本国使用者听，而且几乎总是带有某种胜利的色彩。任何语言社群的辉煌都难以抵挡母语使用者的爱国情怀，而他们也鲜少对自身时代以外的其他时代有真正的了解。

The career of the English language, like that of most of the world’s major languages, is often retold to its own speakers, and seldom without some element of triumph. The glories of any language community are hard for a speaker-patriot to resist, and few have any true conception of ages other than their own.

但即便从本书的视角来看，英语的故事在世界语言中仍然占据着特殊的地位。诚然，在本书写作的时代，英语是传播最广泛的语言。在这个时代，世界已成为一个由即时通讯连接的整体，这使得英语的普及程度独一无二，也让我们不禁思考，是否还有语言能够从中诞生。但对我们而言，不容忽视的事实是，英语拥有极其丰富的历史。这段历史虽然短暂：作为一种可识别的语言，英语的历史不过1500年，而且其本质在其短暂历史的中期就发生了根本性的变化。然而，在这短短的时间里，英语却经历了如此之多的危机和不可预测的结局，几乎可以被视为其先辈——从孟菲斯、巴特那、长安到巴比伦——冒险经历的个人总结。

But even from the perspective of this book, there is still a sense in which the story of English deserves a special position among world languages. True, it happens to be the language with the widest spread in the era when these words are written. And in this era the world has become a single community linked by instant communications, making English uniquely prevalent, and leaving us wondering whether there could still be anywhere for a successor language to spring from. But the material fact for us is that English is a language with a remarkably varied history. This history is short: English as an identifiable language is no more than 1.5 millennia old, and its substance changed radically about halfway through its short life. But it has packed into this short span such a variety of crises and unpredictable outcomes that it can almost be seen as a personal summary of the adventures of its predecessors, all the way back to Memphis, Patna, Chang-an and Babylon.

从众多相似之处来审视英语的一个优势在于，它揭示了许多通常被视为理所当然的发展进程中本质上的奇异之处。我们已经注意到，日耳曼盎格鲁-撒克逊人和弗里西亚人成功地传播了他们的语言，这与其他日耳曼入侵者的成就相比，尤其是与他们同时代的法兰克人和哥特人（他们定居在西罗马帝国的其他地区），堪称一项惊人的壮举。一千多年后，早期定居北美的英国人自发地建立了一个人口众多的英语社区，而法国王室却不得不派遣“嫁女”（filles à marier）来防止年轻的定居者融入当地文化，并组建不会说法语的家庭。又过了一个世纪，英国东印度公司的活动促成了其语言——英语的传播，而同期荷兰东印度公司却仅仅传播了一种早已存在的通用语——马来语。以上仅列举了三种特定情况促进英语传播，但对其他语言却没有类似影响的例子。语言的历史传播难以完全解释；但考虑到多种语言的情况，至少可以帮助我们避免一些片面的认知。

One advantage of viewing English in the light of so many parallels is to reveal the essential strangeness of many developments that are usually taken for granted. We have already noted the success of Germanic Anglo-Saxons and Frisians in implanting their language, a striking feat when set against the achievement of other Germanic invaders, above all their contemporaries the Franks and the Goths settling in other parts of the western Roman empire. More than a thousand years later, the early English settlers in North America were spontaneously to establish a populous English-language community, while the French Crown was having to send out filles à marier to prevent the young settlers from going native and bringing up families without French. And a century after that, the activities of the English East India Company led to the spread of its own language, English, while the Dutch East India Company, over the same period, succeeded only in spreading a pre-existing lingua franca, Malay. These are just three of the cases where a certain kind of situation has contributed to the expansion of English, but has had no similar effect on other languages. The historic spread of a language is a hard thing to account for fully; but keeping a range of languages in mind may at least help us to escape some half-truths.

从二十一世纪初来看，英语的历史可以分为两个截然不同的时期：一个是形成期，从五世纪到十六世纪末，在此期间，英语在不列颠岛上逐渐形成；另一个是传播期，从十七世纪至今，在此期间，英语乘船远航，传播到世界各大洲。

The history of English, at least as viewed from the beginning of the twenty-first century, falls into two very unequal periods: one of formation, from the fifth to the end of the sixteenth centuries, during which the language took shape, growing up in the island of Britain; and one of propagation, from the seventeenth century to the present, in which it took ship, spreading to every continent of the world.

我们之前已经探讨过英语形成初期的情况。当时，正值罗马帝国末期动荡之际，英语由一群日耳曼方言融合而成（参见第七章“逆境求生：英语的出现”，第310页）。尽管面临政治分裂和军事威胁，英语在九世纪已发展成为一种重要的文学语言。然而，两个世纪后，法语征服者扼杀了英语的书面表达。但在接下来的两个世纪里，英语却奇迹般地同化了当时主导它的语言群体，重新崛起成为英国的主要语言。与此同时，英语的地理分布也迅速扩展，在不列颠群岛的各个王国，以及威尔士、苏格兰和爱尔兰地区都建立了桥头堡。在十四至十六世纪，英国经历了另一段动荡时期：瘟疫使人口锐减一半，王位继承屡遭战乱干扰，教会因抗议和分裂而动荡不安，货币也饱受通货膨胀的折磨。在此期间，英语虽有口语和书面语，但各种方言之间却缺乏统一的全国标准。语言的稳定与政治的稳定几乎同时到来，两者都以伦敦为中心，并且伴随着《圣经》的广泛传播。

We have already considered the beginning of the formation period, when, as part of the turmoil at the end of Rome’s empire, it coalesced from a group of Germanic dialects (see Chapter 7, ‘Against the odds: The advent of English’, p. 310). Despite political disunity and military threat, it had developed by the ninth century into a major literary language. Nevertheless, two centuries later, French-speaking conquerors were to stifle its written expression. Somehow, in the course of the next two centuries, it succeeded in assimilating the language community that was dominating it, to re-emerge as the foremost language of the realm. In the same period, it also spread geographically, establishing bridgeheads in every kingdom in the British Isles, among the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish. There was a further period of turmoil, in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, when the population was halved by the plague, the royal succession repeatedly disrupted by war, the Church shaken by protest and schism, and the currency racked by inflation. During all this time, English was spoken and written, but with no national standard uniting the various dialects. Linguistic stability came at much the same time as political stability, both focused on London, and mass readership of the Bible.

在英语传播时期，当英语使用者开始出国旅行和定居时，英国人的性情，以及由此而来的他们的语言，无论从字面意义还是象征意义上，都变得更加世俗化；世界向英国人敞开，但尤其向他们的商业和贸易活动敞开，政府和教会事务则被置于次要地位。这种“英语——商人之友”的理念或许才是英语传播的真正独特之处，尽管英语国家的科学技术也同样强化了这一特点。诚然，这种商业和科学特性使英语区别于西班牙语、法语和俄语等主要竞争对手。在20世纪的近代史上，英语的统治地位更加显著，一个讲英语的前殖民地一跃成为世界强国，英语本身也发展成为一个重要的产业，英语的传播速度远远超过了其母语国家的影响力。据估计，如今以英语为通用语的人数，或许是所有以英语为母语人口总数的三倍。语言的威望恐怕很难再高了。

In the propagation period, when English speakers begin to travel and settle abroad, the temper of the English, and so by association their language too, becomes much more worldly, in both literal and figurative senses; the world is opened up to the English, but above all to their business and trading enterprise, with government and Church concerns very much in the rear. This idea of ‘English—the Businessman’s Friend’ may be what is really distinctive about the spread of this language, though equally distinctively reinforced by English-speaking science and technology. Certainly, this commercial and scientific character sets it apart from such major rivals as Spanish, French and Russian. It has become even more dominant in the very recent history of the twentieth century, when a single English-speaking ex-colony has become the world’s greatest power, competence in the language itself has become a major industry, and the spread of the language has accelerated well beyond the influence of the states that speak it natively. It is estimated that those who use English for convenience as a lingua franca now outnumber–by perhaps three to one—the total population of all native English speakers. Language prestige does not go much higher than this.

英语所获得的这种明显的自主性意味着，与本书讨论的大多数语言不同，即使将英语推向巅峰的政治和经济力量已基本达到顶峰，我们目前仍无法追踪到英语使用量开始下降的迹象。但我们不应因此而气馁。我们所考察的众多语言的发展历程表明，各种因素都可能导致一种世界语言的统治地位终结。因此，在对英语进行论述的最后，不妨借鉴这些语言的发展历程，推测其从目前看似不可撼动的巅峰走向衰落的各种路径，这将颇具启发意义。

This apparent autonomy acquired by English means that, unlike most of the languages considered in this book, it is not yet possible to trace the beginnings of a downward trend in use of the language, even if the political and economic forces that put English up there have largely peaked. But we shall not be deterred. The life-histories of the many languages we have considered have shown various factors that can end the reign of a world language. It will be instructive to finish our account of English by using them to conjecture various paths downward from its present heights, unassailable as they appear.

耐力测试：击退诺曼法兰西

Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French

从某种意义上说，11世纪中叶诺曼人征服英格兰是一种时代错置，是日耳曼人最后一次入侵欧洲国家，但为时已晚了几个世纪^。

In a sense, the Norman conquest of England in the mid-eleventh century was an anachronism, the last of the Germanic invasions to convulse a European country, a couple of centuries too late.^*

毕竟，诺曼人与他们的维京祖先——挪威人——之间只有五六代的血缘关系，而“诺曼人”（Normanni）一词正是“北方人” （NorδrTcross;menn ）的拉丁化形式，这个词在冰岛语中至今仍指代挪威人。九世纪末，在他们的领袖罗洛的带领下，他们曾以武力征服为生，但他们向南航行，最终定居在了后来的诺曼底地区。他们胁迫法兰克国王查理三世（绰号“傻瓜”）通过约公元911年的《圣克莱尔-苏尔-埃普特条约》将这片土地授予他们。在那里，他们逐渐放弃了四处劫掠的生活方式，包括放弃了挪威语；如同典型的日耳曼入侵者一样，仅仅几代人的时间，他们就放弃了使用自己的语言，转而采用当地的罗曼语族语言，也就是他们口中的诺曼法语。 1066 年，罗洛的后裔威廉一世（绰号“私生子”）率军成功入侵英格兰，并将这种语言带到了英格兰。

The Normans, after all, were only five or six generations away from their Norwegian ancestry as Vikings, and Normanni is just a Latinisation of NorδrTcross;menn, ‘north men’, which is still the word for Norwegians in Icelandic Norse. At the end of the ninth century, under their leader Rollo, they had been living by their swords, but they sailed south, and settled in what became Normandy, having coerced the Frankish king Charles III (the Simple) into granting them title, by the Treaty of St-Clair-sur-Epte, c.911. There they proceeded to put away their roving and marauding ways, including the Norse language; as typical Germanic invaders, in a couple of generations they had given up using their own language, and adopted the local Romance tongue, which on their lips is known as Norman French. When Rollo’s descendant, William the Bastard, led his successful invasion of England in 1066, he brought this language into England with him.

英文叠加

English overlaid

但诺曼人入侵英格兰，无论从规模还是政治后果来看，都与之前日耳曼人征服英格兰截然不同。

But the Norman invasion of England was quite unlike the previous Germanic conquests of England in both scale and political consequence.

从规模上看，它很小，至少与当时的英格兰人口相比是如此：威廉带着大约五千名骑士前来，而“随征服者而来”的总人数，最多也只有这个数字的四倍，即两万人，而当时的英格兰人口为150万。^因此，在诺曼人统治的第一代，或许只有百分之一的人会说诺曼法语。

In scale, it was small, at least by comparison with the then population of England: William came with some five thousand knights, and the total numbers who ‘came over with the Conqueror’, all told, will have amounted to at most four times this number, twenty thousand to set against an English population of 1.5 million.² So in the first generation of Norman rule, perhaps one person in a hundred spoke Norman French.

从政治角度来看，这并非一次突袭，也非大规模迁徙，而是一次有预谋的入侵，其根源在于一个严肃的战争理由：威廉声称英格兰国王应效忠于他，并以战争证明了上帝对其权利的支持。结果，英格兰几乎瞬间从撒克逊王国转变为诺曼王国。诺曼人虽然人数不多，却有效地瓦解了英格兰政权。

In political consequence, it was not a raid, nor a mass migration, but a discrete invasion, grounded on a serious casus belli: William claimed that the king of England owed him allegiance, and went on to prove God’s support for his right through battle. The result was almost instant conversion of England from a Saxon to a Norman kingdom. The Normans, though few, effectively decapitated the English regime.

这种语言上的影响可谓是毁灭性的，尤其对于千年之后阅读这些文字记录的我们而言更是如此。如今，国王和贵族都讲法语，英国文学作品的受众群体也随之发生了变化；英语白话文学——它与爱尔兰语一样，是整个欧洲最早蓬勃发展的文学形式之一——就此消亡，取而代之的是盎格鲁-诺曼宫廷爱情故事。从此以后，法律、法庭判决和法律证词几乎全部用法语书写，这种转变在史料中显露无疑；因为法律文件日益成为诺曼社会的规则制定者，并成为政治斗争的主要对象。这种新秩序对僧侣和神职人员的影响相对较小，因为拉丁语仍然是他们学术工作的基本语言；但除了礼拜仪式和神学之外，拉丁语也承担了记录和历史写作的功能。自九世纪阿尔弗雷德大帝统治时期起便持续保存至今的《盎格鲁-撒克逊编年史》于1155年停刊。到了十二世纪中叶，两种语言之间的功能划分已臻于僵化。英语的作用，至少在书面形式上，已所剩无几。但这并不意味着英语的使用就此濒临消亡：尽管英语在史料中鲜有记载，但没有理由认为它在绝大多数民众中的使用有所减少。

The linguistic effect of this looks devastating, especially to us reading the written record a millennium later. Now that the king and the nobility are French speakers, there is a new audience for the literary production of England; English vernacular literature—which with Irish had been the earliest to flower in the whole of Europe—ceases, and in its place comes Anglo-Norman courtly romance. From now on, laws, court judgments and legal depositions are almost all in French, a switch that shows up blatantly in the records; for increasingly it is legal documents which set the rules for Norman society and become the main objects of political struggle. The new order had less concrete effect among monks and clerics, since Latin remained the basic language of their intellectual work; but beside liturgy and theology, Latin also took over the functions of record-keeping and the writing of history. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which had been kept continuously since the reign of Alfred in the ninth century, dies out in 1155. By the mid-twelfth century, this division of functions between the languages had become rigid. There was little apparent role left for English, at least in written form. But this does not mean that the language was endangered in use: despite its low profile in the records, there is no reason to believe that it was spoken any the less among the vast majority of the people.

诺曼法语的传播在某种程度上受到诺曼人所统治的社会等级制度的严格限制。在封建制度下，每个英国男女的地位很大程度上由出身决定，教会是唯一能够凭借功绩晋升的途径，而独身制的限制又极大地限制了这种晋升。因此，讲法语的贵族阶层几乎是一个封闭的群体——尽管通过与撒克逊少女联姻，新鲜血液（无疑也包括一些英国儿童）得以注入——人们几乎没有机会通过效仿主人来改善自身境遇。在封建时代的英国，人们安于自己的位置，通常被限定在村庄之内，甚至很少有机会结识视野更广阔的人。

Partly, the spread of Norman French would have been limited by the very rigidity in the social hierarchy over which the Normans presided. Within the feudal system, the status of every English man and woman was largely determined by birth, with the Church providing the only paths for advancement through merit, and that severely limited through constraints of celibacy. As a result, the French-speaking nobility remained almost a closed society—though fresh blood, and hence no doubt some English in childhood, came in through marriages to Saxon maidens—and there was little or no scope for people to better their prospects through aping their masters. In feudal England, people knew their place, one usually defined within a village, and had little opportunity even to meet people with wider horizons.

推广盎格鲁-诺曼方案

Spreading the Anglo-Norman package

这些世纪发生的社会动态更多地体现在横向而非纵向上，这主要归功于诺曼人在与邻国的战争中无与伦比的实力。诺曼人是优秀的骑兵，事实上，他们是第一批将坐骑带过英吉利海峡的入侵者。^*然而，一旦在战场上取得胜利，他们便通过建造城堡来巩固权力。这些坚固的要塞如此持久，以至于许多城堡至今仍然屹立不倒。城堡是他们的主要创新。诺曼人迅速统一了原本松散的撒克逊王国，并继续向其疆域扩张。在他们的疆域之外，是凯尔特语地区，即不列颠群岛的北部和西部。康沃尔郡早已是盎格鲁-撒克逊王国的一部分，但如今，诺曼人在坎布里亚、威尔士、苏格兰和爱尔兰都取得了重大进展。

Such social dynamics as did occur in these centuries were more horizontal than vertical, and due to the unmatched prowess of the Normans in fighting wars against their neighbours. Normans were fine cavalrymen, in fact the first invaders to bring their mounts with them across the Channel.^* Once won on the battlefield, however, their power was cemented by the building of castles, fortified strongholds so permanent that many of them stand to this day. These were their main innovation. The Normans rapidly unified the somewhat loosely coordinated state of the Saxons, and proceeded to push back its borders. Beyond them lay Celtic-speaking regions, the north and west of the British Isles. Cornwall had already been part of the Anglo-Saxon weal, but in each of Cumbria, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Normans now made serious inroads.

坎布里亚郡的战争从1092年持续到1157年。威尔士的征服则更为漫长；东南部的威尔士于1087年被征服，但尽管依附于诺曼国王的“边境领地”很快在整个威尔士南部建立起来，抵抗并未就此平息。到了12世纪，除南部沿海和西部边境地区外，威尔士的大部分地区都重新宣示了独立，并出现了一段事实上接受本土的“威尔士王国”（Pura Wallia）与被诺曼“边境领地”（Marchia ^Wallie ）包围的威尔士王国的时期。直到1283年，安茹王朝国王爱德华一世才最终完成征服。即便如此，十年后和一百年后，威尔士又爆发了两次叛乱。

Cumbria was the scene of a struggle that lasted from 1092 to 1157. Wales took longer; G went in the south-east was taken by 1087, but although ‘Marcher Lordships’, dependent on the Norman king, were soon established across the whole of southern Wales, resistance did not die away. In the twelfth century, most of the country aside from the southern coast and western borders had reasserted its independence, and there was a period of de facto acceptance of an indigenous Pura Wallia, surrounded by a Norman Marchia Wallie. Only in 1283 did the Angevin king Edward I complete the conquest. Even then, there were two more Welsh rebellions, a decade and then a century later.^*

此前主要讲盖尔语的苏格兰，其入侵过程相对不那么好战。位于东南部的洛锡安地区，自公元638年盎格鲁人攻占爱丁堡以来，早已是英语地区。诺曼征服英格兰时在位的马尔科姆三世国王（^已故）是一位极其亲英的国王；他青年时期曾在英格兰生活，“英语水平与母语不相上下”，并娶了一位英格兰公主玛格丽特为妻。玛格丽特将苏格兰宫廷（当时仍在珀斯）打造成了英格兰奢侈品的市场。因此，马尔科姆并非诺曼人扩张势力的天然盟友，他实际上将统治时期的大部分时间都用于对诺森布里亚进行侵略性入侵。然而，他的继任者，特别是大卫一世（1124-1153 年），对诺曼人的影响极为偏爱：盎格鲁-诺曼语成为宫廷语言，以至于十三世纪时，英国人考文垂的沃尔特评论道：“近几任苏格兰国王自称是法国人，无论在种族、礼仪、语言还是文化上都是如此；在将苏格兰人（即盖尔人）彻底奴役之后，他们只允许法国人与他们结交并为他们效力。” ^³

The penetration of Scotland, hitherto largely Gaelic-speaking, was less warlike. Lothian, in the south-east, had already been English-speaking since the Angles had taken Edinburgh in 638. King Malcolm III,^† on the throne at the time of the Norman conquest of England, had been exceptionally Anglophile; he had spent some of his youth in England, ‘knew the English language quite as well as his own’, and had married an English princess, Margaret, who opened the Scottish court (then still at Perth) as a market for luxury goods from England. No natural ally for the advancing Norman power, then, Malcolm actually spent much of his reign on aggressive raids into Northumbria. Nevertheless, his successors, particularly David I (1124-53), were highly partial to Norman influence: Anglo-Norman became the language of the court, so that in the thirteenth century the Englishman Walter of Coventry remarked: ‘The more recent kings of Scots profess themselves to be rather Frenchmen, both in race and in manners, language and culture; and after reducing the Scots [i.e. Gaels] to utter servitude, they admit only Frenchmen to their friendship and service.’³

但讲法语的贵族带来了讲英语的随从。为了维持他们的生活方式，讲英语的市民群体也加入了他们，这些人从跨境贸易中获利。跨境影响日益扩大，人们开始称他们的语言为“Inglis”，后来（相当于——因为这是一种非常独特的英语）又称其为“Scottis”。尽管苏格兰和英格兰王室在十三世纪末和十四世纪初断断续续地交战，但这似乎无关紧要。

But French-speaking nobles brought English-speaking attendants. And to sustain their way of life, they were joined by communities of burgesses, English-speaking, who profited from cross-border trade. Cross-border influence swelled, and people began to refer to their language as ‘Inglis’, and later (equivalently—for this was a very distinctive kind of English) as ‘Scottis’. It hardly mattered that the Scottish and English crowns remained intermittently at war through the late thirteenth century and into the fourteenth.

在爱尔兰，诺曼人于1166年左右接受了刚刚被废黜的伦斯特国王迪尔马特·麦克·默查达的邀请，出兵干预，帮助他对抗爱尔兰最高国王。这无疑是英格兰国王亨利二世的一次机会主义之举——教皇颁布的教皇诏书《赞美之书》（Laudabiliter）也为其提供了支持——使他得以利用边境领主们渴望征服威尔士以外地区的野心。结果，诺曼人在都柏林周围建立了定居点，并很快向北、向西扩张，最终成为爱尔兰地貌上不可分割的一部分，其规模不断扩大，使英格兰王室得以断断续续地控制整个爱尔兰岛。

In Ireland, the Normans had accepted an invitation around 1166 from Diarmait Mac Murchada, newly deposed king of Leinster, to intervene on his behalf against the Irish High King. It was an act of opportunism on the part of the English king Henry II—neatly backed by a papal bull, Laudabiliter—but enabled him to channel some of the animal spirits of Marcher Lords looking for new conquests beyond Wales. The result was a settlement of Normans around Dublin, soon spreading out northward and westward, which became a permanent feature of the Irish landscape, and ultimately expanded to give the English Crown fitful control of the whole island.

在诺曼人扩张领土的过程中，其影响带来了同样复杂的语言体系：统治者使用法语，随从使用英语，技术人员使用拉丁语。从长远来看，英语作为三角关系的顶点影响最大，尽管从功能上看，它的影响最为有限：毕竟，在所有这些地区，英语都必须强加于使用其他语言的被统治者之上，这些语言可能是坎布里亚语、威尔士语，或者（如在苏格兰和爱尔兰）盖尔语，而盖尔语的文学传统与英语一样深厚。

In all these extensions to its domain, Norman influence brought the same rather complex linguistic regime: French for the rulers, English for their retinue, and Latin for technical support. In the long run, the English apex of the triangle proved the most influential, although functionally it was the most gratuitous: in all these lands, after all, it had to be superimposed on a subject population who spoke yet another language, Cumbrian, Welsh or (as in Scotland and Ireland) Gaelic, and which in the Gaelic case had as strong a literary tradition as English.

在早期，语言并非一个明确的问题，那时外来统治尚未有机会在几代人中显现其影响；但当它真正发挥作用时，只有英语，也只有英语，获得了正式的强化。因此，当诺曼当局在1366年感到盖尔语在爱尔兰的影响力复兴，甚至在都柏林周围的英格兰人聚居区也开始使用盖尔语时，他们的回应是颁布（用法语）《基尔肯尼法令》。该法令在表达了对教会自由的担忧，并要求在婚姻中实行严格的种族隔离制度（compaternitie nurtur de enfantz concubinance ou de caise，意为“婚姻、教父教母、抚养子女、妾侍或通过爱情”）之后，奇怪地将对语言的关注与正确的马鞍礼仪放在了一起：

Language was not an explicit issue in the early days, before foreign domination had had a chance to spell out its effects over the generations; but when it did, it was English, and only English, which received the benefit of formal reinforcement. So when in 1366 the Norman authorities felt threatened by a resurgence of Gaelic influence in Ireland, causing that language to be used even in the English Pale around Dublin, their response was to issue (in French) the Statute of Kilkenny, which, after expressing a concern about the freedom of the Church and requiring strict apartheid in marriage compaternitie nurtur de enfantz concubinance ou de caise, ‘marriage, godparenting, fostering of children, concubinage or by amour’, curiously brackets a concern for language with proper saddle etiquette:

三、另规定，所有英国人必须使用英语，并以英语名字命名，完全摒弃爱尔兰人的命名方式；所有英国人必须根据其身份，遵循英国的习俗、时尚、骑术和服饰；若有英国人或居住在英国人中的爱尔兰人违反本法令，在彼此之间使用爱尔兰语，并因此被剥夺公民权，其土地和房产（如有）将被没收并交由其领主，直至其前往吾王陛下的府邸，并找到足够的担保人，承诺采用并使用英语……另规定，居住在英国人中的圣教会的受俸 ...从现在到下一个圣米迦勒节之间，他们将有时间学习英语并准备马鞍^。4

iii. Also it is ordained and established, that every Englishman do use the English language, and be named by an English name, leaving off entirely the manner of naming used by the Irish; and that every Englishman use the English custom, fashion, mode of riding and apparel, according to his estate; and if any English, or Irish living among the English, use the Irish language among themselves, contrary to this ordinance, and thereof be attainted, his lands and tenements, if he have any, shall be seized and placed in the hands of his immediate lord, until he shall come to one of the places of our Lord the King, and find sufficient surety to adopt and use the English language … and also that beneficed persons of holy Church, living amongst the English, shall use the English language; and if they do not, that their ordinaries shall have issues of their benefices until they use the English language in the manner aforesaid; and they shall have respite in order to learn the English language, and to provide saddles, between this time and the feast of St Michael next coming.⁴

后来，继续使用这些凯尔特语之一，与其说是对英语在海外生存的威胁，不如说是一种忠诚度存疑的象征。因此，亨利八世虽然其父是靠威尔士人和康沃尔人的支持才登上王位的，却在1536年的《联合法案》（现以英文颁布）中加入了以下内容：

Later, continued use of one of these Celtic languages was considered not so much a threat to the survival of English abroad as a token of dubious loyalty. So Henry VIII, though himself the son of a king who had taken power with Welsh and Cornish support, included the following in the Act of Union of 1536 (now delivered in English):

兹颁布法令，所有法官、专员、郡长、验尸官、财产没收官、管家及其副手，以及所有其他法律官员和大臣，均须以英语宣读并主持所有庭审、法庭、百户区、利特区、郡长法庭及其他所有法庭；所有陪审团和调查的宣誓，以及所有其他法律宣誓书、判决和诉讼，均须以英语作出；并且自此以后，任何使用威尔士语的人，不得在英格兰、威尔士或国王统治的任何其他地区担任任何职务或领取任何报酬，否则将丧失其职务或报酬，除非其使用英语^。5

Also be it enacted that all justices, Commissioners, sheriffs, coroners, escheators, stewards and their lieutenants, and all other officers and ministers of the law, shall proclaim and keep the sessions, courts, hundreds, leets, sheriff’s courts and all other courts in the English tongue; and all oaths of juries and inquests, and all other affidavits, verdicts and wagers of law to be given and done in the English tongue; and also that from henceforth no person or persons that use the Welsh speech or language shall have or enjoy any manner of office or fees within this realm of England, Wales or other the King’s dominion upon pain of forfeiting the same offices or fees, unless he or they use the English speech or tongue.⁵

同年，亨利国王致信爱尔兰西部戈尔韦的市民，敦促道：“该镇所有居民务必讲英语，并以英国人的举止使用英语；尤其要让你们每个人都把孩子送去上学，学习英语。” ⁶

In the same year, King Henry was writing to the citizens of Galway in the west of Ireland, urging: ‘every inhabitante within the saide towne indever theym selfe to speke Englyshe, and to use theym selffe after the English facion; and specially that you, and every one of you, do put forth your childe to scole, to lerne to speke Englyshe’.⁶

但五年后，宣布亨利八世为爱尔兰国王的法案仍然需要用爱尔兰语提交给爱尔兰下议院和上议院。^尽管诺曼征服使英语的使用传播到不列颠群岛的各个角落，但这并没有因此消除其他语言的使用。

But five years later, the bill declaring Henry VIII king of Ireland still had to be presented in Irish both to the Irish Commons and Lords.⁷ Although the Norman invasions had caused use of English to spread into all parts of the British Isles, it had not thereby eliminated the use of other languages.

诺曼法语的衰落

The waning of Norman French

如果诺曼人和安茹人国王能够保住他们在英吉利海峡两岸的双重领地，那么社会体系或许会在某个时期拥有足够的灵活性，使法语这种具有威望的语言得以向下传播，并最终遍及整个王国。然而，事与愿违。法国王国始终无法容忍诺曼国王（最初是其附庸）的独立，1204年，腓力二世国王抓住机会，在战场上击败了其中一位国王约翰，从而结束了他们对诺曼底的统治。在严苛的封建制度下，男爵们不可能同时效忠于两个国家：他们必须选择效忠于英格兰国王或法国国王，并放弃在另一个王国拥有的任何土地。此后，英国男爵们彻底成为了英国人。不久之后，正如 1258 年的《牛津条例》（首次以英语和法语颁布的一项措施）所表明的那样，他们将不再容忍来自法国的过度影响，即使这种影响来自国王在安茹的剩余封地。

Had the Norman and Angevin kings retained their twin domains on both sides of the Channel, it is possible that at some point there would have been enough flexibility in the social system to allow the prestige language, French, to trickle down, and become widespread all over their realm. But it was not to be. The French realm had never been able to abide the independence of the Norman kings, originally its vassals, and in 1204 King Philip II seized the opportunity to defeat one of them (King John) in battle, and so end their control of Normandy. Within the rigours of the feudal system, it was impossible for barons to maintain a divided loyalty: henceforth they must declare fealty either to the king of England or the king of France, and give up any lands they might hold in the other kingdom. In the sequel, English barons became determinedly English. Soon, as the Provisions of Oxford showed in 1258—a measure for the first time promulgated in English as well as French—they would no longer tolerate excess influence from France, even if coming from the king’s remaining fiefs in Anjou.

…我们欢迎所有 ure treowe，在 pe treowpe pBætheo 我们 o$nIen，pæt heo stedefæstlicheealden 和 swerien 到ealden 和 werien $pBo i-setnesses $pBæt beon i-makede $pBur$nI $pBan toforen i-seide rædesmen o$pBer $pBur$nI $pBe moare dæl of heom，也是在 i-seide 之前……

… we hoaten all ure treowe, in pe treowpe pBætheo us o$nIen, pæt heo stedefæstliche healden and swerien to healden and to werien $pBo i-setnesses $pBæt beon i-makede $pBur$nI $pBan toforen i-seide rædesmen o$pBer $pBur$nI $pBe moare dæl of heom, also alse it is beforen i-seide…

…comandons et enjoinons a tuz nos feaus et Leans, en la fei k'il nus deivent, k'il fermement teignent, et jurgent a tenir et a maintenir les establissemenz ke sunt fet, u sunt a fere, par l'avant dit cunseil, u la greignure party de eus, en la maniere k'il est dit desuz…

…comandons et enjoinons a tuz nos feaus et leans, en la fei k’il nus deivent, k’il fermement teignent, et jurgent a tenir et a maintenir les establissemenz ke sunt fet, u sunt a fere, par l’avant dit cunseil, u la greignure partie de eus, en la maniere k’il est dit desuz…

……我们命令所有臣民，出于他们对我们所应尽的忠诚，坚定不移地遵守并宣誓遵守和保护上述议员或多数议员制定和将要制定的法令，如上所述…… ⁸

…we command all our subjects, in the fealty which they owe us, that they steadfastly keep and swear to keep and to protect the ordinances that are made and are to be made by the aforesaid counsellors or by a majority of them, as is said above …⁸

在英国，由于缺乏日常练习，法语逐渐成为学校里学习的一门科目，而不是精英阶层的日常语言。

In England, from lack of day-to-day practice, French began to be a subject learnt at school, rather than the living language of the elite.

此前，在试图解释盎格鲁-撒克逊人对语言的巨大影响时，我们推测英语最初是在公元五世纪一场大流行病之后在英国扎根的（参见第七章“Einfall：日耳曼语和斯拉夫语的传播”，第313页）。但谈到黑死病的影响，则无需任何推测。这场瘟疫于1348年首次传入英格兰，并在该世纪结束前又两次卷土重来。社会各阶层都未能幸免，但由于其传播方式——通过跳蚤或老鼠在人身上传播——它在人口稠密的地区，例如城市、法院和修道院，传播最为迅速。英格兰的人口减少了一半，而由此带来的经济后果是个人净资产翻了一番。即使是那些除了自身健康（或生存）之外一无所有的人也从中受益，因为相对于仍然保持不变的土地数量而言，劳动力已成为一种稀缺资源。其结果是封建制度遭到巨大冲击，包括底层民众收入的提高，以及个人流动性的增强，尤其是从乡村到城镇的流动，因为人们实际上可以自由地离开家乡去谋生。在语言方面，法语贵族的地位受到削弱：社会各行各业越来越注重能力，但实际上，任何人要想获得一份职业，只需要精通拉丁语和英语即可。1362年的《诉讼法》正是这一时代的标志：此后，法庭诉讼程序将以英语进行，但“以拉丁语记录”。

Earlier, when trying to explain the remarkable linguistic impact of the Anglo-Saxons, we conjectured that English originally established itself in Britain in the wake of a major epidemic, in the fifth century AD (see Chapter 7, ‘Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances’, p. 313). But when it comes to the effects of the Black Death, no conjecture is necessary. This plague first reached England in 1348, and returned twice more before the century was out. No sector of society was safe, but by its nature—borne by fleas on people or rats—it was most virulent in highly populated areas, among them cities, courts and monasteries. England’s population was halved, and as an economic consequence net personal worth doubled. Even those who had no assets but their own health—or survival—benefited, since labour had become a scarce resource in relation to the still-constant amount of land. The result was massive disruption of the feudal system, including a rise in income at the lower end, and an increase in personal mobility, especially from country to town, as men became in effect free to seek their fortunes away from home. Linguistically, the position of the French-speaking nobility was undercut: professions throughout society were increasingly open to merit, but increasingly all that anyone really needed to make a career was literacy in Latin and English. A sign of the times was the Statute of Pleading of 1362: court proceedings would henceforth take place in English, though ‘enrolled in Latin’.

约翰·德·特雷维萨（John de Trevisa）是一位牧师，也是牛津大学的前研究员。1385年，他评论了当时的状况，并对正在翻译的一篇文献提出了异议。兰道夫·希格登（Ranulph Higden）在其十四世纪中叶的著作《世界通史》（ Polychronicon）中写道，他所看到的许多人语言的讹变有两个原因：一是孩子们被教导将拉丁语翻译成法语，而不是他们自己的语言；二是乡下人努力装腔作势地模仿法语，以冒充绅士。特雷维萨在翻译完这段文字后补充道：

John de Trevisa, a curate and former fellow of Oxford, commented on the situation in 1385, taking issue with a text he was translating. Ranulph Higden had written, in his Polychronicon (Universal History) of the mid-fourteenth century, that there were two reasons for the corruption he saw in many people’s language, namely that children were taught to construe (i.e. translate Latin) into French, not their own language, and that country people laboured to pass themselves off as gentlemen by affecting French. After translating this, Trevisa adds:

这种方法在大死病（即黑死病）之前被广泛使用。但后来它发生了一些变化。例如，语法大师约翰·科努瓦爵士将学校的语法知识和法语结构改成了英语。其他学校的老师也采用了同样的做法……他们把学校里所有的法语都扔掉，而完全使用英语的结构。这样做的好处之一是他们学得更快，语法也更快；坏处是他们现在既不会法语也不会法语，这对那些即将离开人世的人来说是件坏事，而且绅士们也没有机会教他们的孩子说法语了^。

This maner was moche used to fore the Grete Deth [i.e. the Black Death]. But syth it is somdele chaunged. For Sir John Cornouayl, a master of gramer, chayngede the lore in gramer scole and construction of Frenssh in to Englysshe. And other scoolmasters use the same way… and leve all Frenssh in scoles and use al construction in Englissh. Wherin they have avauntage one way, that is they lerne the sonner theyr gramer, and in another disavauntage, for now they lerne no Frenssh ne can none, which is hurte for them that shal pass the see, and also gentilmen have moche left to teche theyr children to speke Frenssh.⁹

因此，到了十四世纪末，法语在英国已不再作为教育媒介语，因为它被认为是一种不必要的障碍，阻碍了人们理解本土语言；人们不再认为孩子们会从小就学习法语。如今，法语即便有用，也仅限于海外旅行；但人们仍然觉得，一位体面的绅士应该确保他的儿子们接受良好的法语教育^。

By the late fourteenth century, then, French had been dropped as a medium of education in England as a needless barrier to vernacular understanding; there was no more presumption that any children would grow up with French. It was now a language that was only of use in overseas travel, if at all; but there was still a feeling that a proper gentleman should make sure that his sons had a decent grounding in it.^*

黑死病之后的一个世纪里，就连皇室成员也停止使用法语。理查二世巧妙地处理了1381年的农民起义，表明他完全有能力用英语赢得普通民众的拥护。亨利四世废黜理查二世后，于1399年用英语发表了加冕演说——这是史无前例的，正如他的儿子亨利五世在1415年阿金库尔战役中发表的战报一样。^*因此，最终，诺曼人也失去了法语，正如四百年前他们失去了诺尔斯语一样。这种语言如同他们昔日身份的最后幽灵般消失殆尽，因为到了十五世纪，诺曼人已在世界各地绝迹。

In the century after the Black Death, even royalty stopped using French. Richard II, with his deft handling of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, showed that he was quite able to appeal to a common crowd in English. After deposing him, Henry IV made his coronation speech of 1399 in English—the first of its kind, as were his son Henry V’s dispatches from the Agincourt campaign of 1415.^* So ultimately, the Normans lost their French too, just as four hundred years earlier they had lost their Norse. The language vanished like a last ghostly reminder of their former identity, for by the fifteenth century there were no more Normans anywhere.

稳定语言

Stabilising the language

Also Englischmen, peyz hy hadde from pe bygynnyng pre maner speche, Souperon, Norperon, and Myddel speche (in pe myddel of pe lond), as hy com of pre people of Germania, nopeles, by commyxstion and mellyng furst wip Danes and afterward wip Normans, in menye pe contray longage ys apeyred, som usep strange wlaffyng, chyteryng, harry ng and garryng grisbittyng.

此外，英国人虽然从一开始就有三种语言：南部方言、北部方言和中部方言，因为他们来自日耳曼尼亚的三种民族。然而，通过与丹麦人以及后来的诺曼人进行交流和融合，在许多方面，当地语言显得非常怪异、生硬、粗俗和含糊不清^。

Also englysshmen though they had fro the begynnyng thre maner speches Southern northern and myddel speche in the middel of the londe as they come of thre maner of people of Germania. Netheless by commyxtion and medlyng first with dans and afterward with normans In many thynges the countreye langage is appayred // for somme use straunge wlaffyng // chyteryng harryng garryng and grisbytyng.^†

约翰·德·特雷维萨，《拉努尔菲·希格登编年史》，第一卷，第59页。原文于1385年在康沃尔郡出版；威廉·卡克斯顿的抄本于1482年在伦敦出版。

John de Trevisa, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, i, 59 Original text, Cornwall, 1385; William Caxton’s transcription, London, 1482

本书刻意避免过多讨论方言的差异。没有一种语言是完全同质的，所有广泛使用的语言都存在区域变体。但方言的本质决定了它们的身份远比完整的语言模糊得多：它们并非界定语言社群整体的边界，而是界定社群内部的区域身份。由于缺乏清晰的群体身份，方言之间往往相互重叠，甚至在边缘地带融合；语言学家通常发现，描述一些独特的语言特征，例如不圆唇的u发音、动词复数以-en结尾、动词倾向于放在句末，或者特定的用词选择（例如用eyren代替eggs），并将这些特征映射到整个语言区域，比试图将每个区域变体都描述为一个独立的、拥有各自独立的音系、语法和词汇的子语言要容易得多。统计语言的数量远比统计一种语言内部的方言数量要容易得多。

This book has deliberately avoided much talk of distinct dialects. No language is totally homogeneous, and all widespread languages have their regional variants. But by their nature dialects have a much vaguer identity than full languages: they do not define the boundaries of language communities as wholes, but rather regional identities within them. Lacking a clear group identity, they tend to overlap, even to merge at the edges; and linguists often find it easier to speak of distinct features, such as an unrounded pronunciation of u, a verb plural ending in -en, a tendency to delay verbs to the end of the clause, or a particular choice of words, such as eyren instead of eggs, and map these across the whole language area, than to try to characterise each regional variant as a discrete whole sub-language with its own separate phonology, grammar and vocabulary. It is far easier to count languages than to count the dialects within a language.

从形式学的角度来看，一种语言的首选“标准”形式仅仅是众多方言中的一种，是从该语言社群在其地域内使用的所有方言中挑选出来的一种特征。然而，要就哪种方言应被视为标准达成一致意见并非易事。例如，早期现代爱尔兰语曾拥有一套独特的宫廷和文学语言规范，这套规范在16世纪末盖尔语统治被推翻后失传，并且很难从20世纪爱尔兰语的三种主要变体中重建。在英语历史上，关于英语在诺曼人征服之前的10至11世纪究竟有多接近拥有国家标准，至今仍存在争议；但显然，在14至15世纪英语复兴时期，任何人都很难决定哪种语言才配得上“最佳英语”的称号。而且，最初根本没有做出任何决定。现存的文学作品往往展现出作者独特的语言风格和词汇组合，但这些组合通常仍能表明他是英格兰中部人、伦敦人、肯特人、南方人、北方人还是苏格兰人。在文字全部以手写形式保存，且重要著作大多以拉丁文写成的时代，或许用方言写成的书籍在地域之外难以阅读这一点并不重要。如果一本好书需要更广泛地传播，总有人可以将其方言翻译成其他语言，就像《世界之笔》（Cursor Mundi）的作者翻译圣母升天的故事那样。

The preferred ‘standard’ form of a language is, from a formal point of view, just one of the dialects, a preferred selection of features from among all the alternatives that are in use somewhere in the language community’s territories. Nevertheless, it is not always easy to reach agreement on which dialect should be taken as the standard. Early Modern Irish, for example, had a distinct code for courtly and literary use, which was lost when Gaelic lordship was overthrown at the end of the sixteenth century, and which it has been very hard to rebuild out of the three main varieties of the language current in twentieth-century Irish. In the history of English, it is still debated how close the language had come to having a national standard in the tenth and eleventh centuries before the Normans took over; but clearly, in the period of its re-emergence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was very difficult for anyone to decide what sort of language should be dignified with the title of ‘the best English’. And at first, no decision was made. The literature that has survived tends to show the speech style and vocabulary of the writer in idiosyncratic combinations that nonetheless usually identify him as a Midlander, a Londoner, a Kentishman, a Southerner, a Northerner or a Scot. When writing was all in manuscript, and important writing was all in Latin anyway, perhaps it mattered little that books in the vernacular were hard to read outside their local region. If a good book needed to be read more widely, someone could always convert its dialect, as the author of the Cursor Mundi did the story of the Assumption of Mary.

在其他英语中，它是德劳恩，	在英格兰南部，它被画了出来。
然后把它转过来，直到我们的阿姨	我已经把它变成了我们自己的
Langage o northrin lede ,	北方民间语言
Pat Can nan oiper 英语。	它看不懂其他任何英文^。10

但缺乏统一标准在语言使用的两大领域——官方语言和文学语言——都造成了问题。一旦君主及其朝廷重新使用英语，就必须采用最权威的英语：但他们应该如何在官方法律和公告中表达，才能确保这些法律和公告能够被全国人民接受、理解和执行？英国不仅仅是一个政府，它还是一个国家，人们越来越感到它拥有独特的个性，并在世界上扮演着重要的角色，因此需要一种独特而鲜明的声音。简单地称之为“英语”固然很好，但当一位作家开始写作时，在那些日后被称为英国文学的作品中，究竟应该采用哪种英语词汇和语调呢？随着15世纪末印刷机的出现，书籍开始大规模生产，这个问题变得更加紧迫。从此以后，同一本书的相同副本可能会流传到王国的各个角落：为了充分利用新的规模经济，这些副本中应该出现哪种语言形式？

But the absence of a standard came to be a problem in two major areas of language use, the official and the literary. Once the sovereign and his courts again spoke English, it would have to be the pre-eminent English: but how should they express themselves in official laws and proclamations, so that they could be published, understood and acted upon, all over the land? And England was not just a government. It was a nation, increasingly felt to have a distinctive character, and a part to play in the world, and hence needing a distinctive, and distinct, voice. It was all very well to blandly name this ‘the English tongue’. But when an author got down to writing, which variety of all the English words and inflexions on offer should prevail, in the books that would more and more be known as English literature? This question became much more urgent when the printing presses began mass production of books in the late fifteenth century. Henceforth, identical copies of a single book might expect to go to all parts of the kingdom: what form of the language should appear in them to take full advantage of the new economies of scale?

这并非历史学家人为提出的问题，并非为了凸显整个社会面临的困境，也并非答案凭空而来。对某些人来说，答案其实非常明确。杰弗里·乔叟在他用14世纪80年代伦敦英语写成的诗歌《特洛伊罗斯与克瑞西达》的结尾，加了一句诗：

This is not an artificial question of historians, put to dramatise a predicament confronting society as a whole, to which an answer emerged as if blindly. For some people it presented itself quite explicitly. Geoffrey Chaucer, in the final envoi of his poem Troilus and Criseide, written in London English in the 1380s, adds a verse:

而且种类如此繁多	正因为存在如此巨大的多样性。
在英语和我们漫长的写作中，	用英语，用我们母语的文字来说，
所以，我向上帝祈祷，不要写信给我。	所以，我向上帝祈祷，愿没有人误写你的名字。
ne the mysmetre 代表舌头的默认值。	也不会因为你不懂语言而误解你。
而你身在何处，或她们的歌声	无论你在哪里被阅读，或者被歌颂，
愿你明白，上帝我必明白！	我祈求上帝让你的话被人理解。
但就我这番话的目的而言，却并非如此。	并且是指我之前所说的话所指的含义^。11

他显然既担心从一种方言抄写到另一种方言可能导致文本失真，也担心读者或听众难以理解文本^。

Here he is apparently as much worried about the corruption of the text that may come from copying from one dialect to another as he is for the poor reader or listener trying to make sense of the text.^*

在英国，似乎从未有人提出过一个可能的解决方案：让不同的方言成为不同类型作品的标准语言。尽管我们已经看到，这种情况在古希腊文学早期就已出现，伊比利亚半岛在某种程度上也出现了类似的现象——葡萄牙语甚至在西班牙也发展成为爱情诗歌的载体。例如，十三世纪的两首动物对话诗《猫头鹰与夜莺》和《狐狸与狼》的成功，或许会使英格兰南部方言成为此类作品的首选语言。然而，这种情况从未发生。相反，一种方言最终被广泛接受。

One possible solution that never seems to have suggested itself in England was for different dialects to become standard for different types of writing, although we have seen that this is what had happened in the early days of Greek literature, and to some extent also in Iberia, when Portuguese developed a role as the vehicle of love poetry, even in Spain. It would have been conceivable, for example, that the success of ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’, and ‘The Fox and the Wolf, two beast dialogues in verse of the thirteenth century, might have made Southern English the preferred language for this type of conceit. But nothing like this ever happened. Instead, a single dialect came to be preferred for all.

英国第一位印刷商和出版商威廉·卡克斯顿面临着最为极端的问题，并在解决这一问题上发挥了重要作用。我们可以预见答案：绝大多数情况下（正如我们将在第13章第529页提到的），首都的方言会成为其国家语言的标准语。在宣布他的政策之前，卡克斯顿确实指出了这一困境：

William Caxton, the first English printer and publisher, faced the problem in the most extreme form, and was highly influential in solving it. We can predict what the answer would be: overwhelmingly (as we shall note in Chapter 13, p. 529) the dialect spoken in a capital city has become the standard for its national language. Before declaring his policy, Caxton did point out the predicament:

当然，由于语言的多样性和变化，要让每个人都听懂确实很难。因为如今，任何在本国略有名望的人，都会用一些鲜有人能理解的方式和词汇来谈论公事公事。一些正直而伟大的文士曾来找我，希望我能找到的最奇特的词汇。因此，在玩世不恭、粗俗怪诞之时，我感到十分惭愧。但依我之见，如今常用的词汇比古老而晦涩的英语更容易理解。鉴于此书并非为粗鄙之人而作，更非为通晓武艺、爱情与骑士精神的文士和贵族绅士而作，故我已将此书精简并翻译成我们的英语，译文并非粗俗或晦涩，而是力求使之易于理解，蒙上帝恩典，正如我的译本所示^。12

Certaynly it is harde to playse every man by cause of dyversite & chaunge of langage. For in these dayes every man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre, wyll utter his commynycacyon and maters in suche maners & termes that fewe men shall understonde theym. And som honest and grete Clerkes have ben wyth me, and desired me to wryte the moste curyous termes that I coude fynde. And thus bytwene playn, rude & curyous, I stande abasshed. But in my judgemente the comyn terms that be dayli used ben lyghter to be understonde than the olde and auncyent englysshe. And for as moche as the present booke is not for a rude uplondyssh man to laboure therin, ne rede it, but onely for a clerk & a noble gentylman that feleth and understondeth in faytes of armes, in love, & in noble chyvalrye, therfor in a meane bytwene bothe I have reduced & translated this sayd booke in to our englysshe, not ouer rude ne curyous, but in suche termes as shall be understanden, by goddys grace, accordynge to my copye.¹²

因此，卡克斯顿声称自己遵循的是英国经典的合理妥协策略。但实际上，他是在将文本转换成伦敦英语。例如，本节开头的段落就清楚地表明了这一点：约翰·德·特雷维萨的原著文本与一个世纪后卡克斯顿出版的版本并列呈现。仔细观察，你会发现这只是一系列细微的改动——例如用“they ”代替“hy”，去掉复数形式的动词词尾“ -ep”，以及将“b”和“z”分别替换为“th”和“gh”——但即便在五百年后的今天，这些改动对于使文本更易于现代英语使用者理解仍然意义非凡。我们今天所知的标准英语，至今仍然带有卡克斯顿及其同时代人当年所做决定的印记。

Caxton, then, claimed to be following a classic English policy of reasonable compromise. But what he was actually doing was converting texts into London English. This is clear, for example, in the passage that begins this section, where the text that John de Trevisa had originally written is set out above the version published a century later by Caxton. Examined closely, it is a fairly slight set of changes—here using they for hy, eliminating the verbal ending -ep in the plural, and replacing b and z throughout with th and gh—but it is still amazing what a difference it makes in bringing a text into the ambit of readability for a speaker of modern English, even now, some five hundred years on. Standard English, as we now know it, still bears the mark of those decisions taken by Caxton and his contemporaries.

一旦做出这一决定，印刷品的日益普及，以及公众识字能力的提高，都极大地强化了当时印刷品所使用的特定方言。牛津和剑桥这两所英语书籍的主要产地也位于同一方言区，即通常所说的西米德兰兹南部地区，这无疑也起到了推波助澜的作用。^*一旦有足够多的人能够阅读并开始阅读，印刷术就成为了最早的大众传媒，其两极分化、“赢家通吃”的效应，如今在电视文化中已屡见不鲜。人们不可避免地从他们阅读的书籍中学习英语的正确书写方式，于是，至少在书面上，“国王的英语”也变成了“人民的英语”。“英语”的定义，第一次被确立了。

Once this decision was taken, the growing availability of printed literature, in concert with growing powers of literacy among the public, strongly reinforced use of the particular dialect that was being printed. It helped that the main sources of book-writing in English, Oxford and Cambridge, were also located in the same broad dialect area, often known as southern West Midlands.^* Printing, once enough people could read and did read, became the first of the mass media, with the polarising, ‘winner takes all’ effects now familiar from TV culture. People inevitably learnt from the books they read how English should be written, and the King’s English thereby became the people’s English too, at least on the page. ‘The English tongue’, for the first time, was being defined.

这一过程并非英语独有。几乎完全相同的语言定义过程几乎同时发生在西欧其他语言身上，尤其是法语、西班牙语和德语，这些语言在口语上的方言差异至少不亚于英语。16世纪上半叶，法国的印刷商开始制定拼写和重音规则，着手一项从未完成的任务：精简大量传统上由纯粹主义者书写但从未在法语中发音的辅音。西班牙语的发音自拉丁语时期以来变化较小，因此可以更加严格地遵循语音规则；但内布里哈1492年出版的卡斯蒂利亚语语法书的存在，意味着排除其他方言（尤其是与其密切相关的阿拉贡语）特有的语法形式有了依据。

This process was not confined to English. Almost precisely comparable processes of language definition were under way at the same time for other languages of western Europe, notably French, Spanish and German, which in speech had been at least as dialectally riven as English. French typographers in the first half of the sixteenth century begin to give rules for spelling and use of accents, beginning the task—one never completed—of pruning the vast numbers of consonants traditionally written by purists but never pronounced in that language. Spanish, whose pronunciation had changed less since it had been Latin, could afford to be more rigorously phonetic; but the existence of Nebrija’s 1492 grammar of Castilian meant that there was a basis for excluding forms characteristic of other dialects, particularly the closely related Aragonese.

对比表明，在印刷文学萌芽的时代，政治统一并非定义民族语言的必要条件。当时德语地区并没有统一的政府。然而，1522年，出生于下萨克森和图林根的马丁·路德出版了他用自己的德语翻译的新约圣经，并始终致力于“让德国各地的人们都能理解”。1534年，他又出版了旧约圣经。凭借其作品的流行（和卓越），他成功地以地方方言为蓝本，确立了标准德语。在德语区更远的地方，如巴塞尔、斯特拉斯堡、奥格斯堡和纽伦堡，也出版了圣经的地方版本，但这些版本的地方化程度仅限于添加路德使用的更具西方特色的词汇表；而且，人们首次开始编写完整的德语语法，其内容明确地基于路德的用法。 ¹³这就是标准德语的定义。

The comparison shows that political unification was in no way essential to the definition of a national language in this natal age for print literature. The lands where German was spoken had no single government. Nevertheless, in 1522 Martin Luther, a native of Lower Saxony and Thuringia, brought out his translation of the New Testament into his own German, aspiring all the while ‘to be understood by the inhabitants of Germany High and Low’. He added the Old Testament in 1534. Through the popularity (and excellence) of his work, he succeeded in establishing standard German in the image of his local dialects. Local editions of the Bible were made in farther parts of German-speaking territory, in Basel, Strasburg, Augsburg and Nuremberg, but localised only to the extent of adding glossaries of Luther’s more distinctively westerly terms; and for the first time, whole grammars of the German language began to be written, explicitly based on Luther’s usage.¹³ Thus was Hochdeutsch defined.

《圣经》在英语的定义中也扮演着至关重要的角色。显然，十六世纪初印刷术的普及极大地推动了新教思想的发展，而新教思想当时正撼动着西方基督教。毕竟，路德之所以将德语定义为英语，仅仅是因为他热切希望上帝的圣言能够直接惠及所有人，而不仅仅是学者。英语读者同样渴望获得这份恩赐；事实上，这种热情可以追溯到1382年，当时约翰·威克里夫的译本以手抄本的形式流传开来，却在1407-1409年间遭到严厉镇压：总有人认为，伟大的福祉必须在严格的监管下才能传播，而这种观点在很大程度上一直持续到十五世纪末。

The Bible was cardinal also in the definition of English. Evidently, the explosion of print literacy in the early sixteenth century was a major support to Protestant ideas, which were rocking western Christianity at exactly this time. Luther was, after all, only defining the German language as a byproduct of his passionate concern that the word of God be available directly to everyone, not just the learned. Readers of English were just as avid for this boon; indeed, such enthusiasm went back to 1382, when John Wyclif’s translation had been put into circulation through handwritten volumes, only to be rigorously suppressed in 1407–9: there is always a party who believes that great blessings must be distributed only under rigorous supervision, and this view largely prevailed until the end of the fifteenth century.

十六世纪，一系列英文圣经相继问世，其中以威廉·廷代尔1525年出版的新约圣经最为著名。 ¹⁴当然，这些圣经起初被视为煽动性文件，但即便如此，它们依然广受欢迎。到了伊丽莎白一世统治时期（1558-1603年），阅读英文圣经的权利^*已得到确立；与此同时，或许更为重要的，是人人都在阅读的《公祷书》。1611年，由皇家委员会编纂的《詹姆斯国王钦定版圣经》确立了圣经的权威文本，此后三个世纪，十代英语基督徒都以这部圣经为共同的文本。

A series of English-language Bibles came out in print in the sixteenth century, led off by William Tyndale’s 1525 New Testament.¹⁴ They were at first seditious documents, of course; but none the less popular for that. By the reign of Elizabeth, 1558–1603, the right to read the Bible in English^* was firmly established; and with it, perhaps even more important as a text that everyone was reading, the Book of Common Prayer. Then in 1611 the King James Bible, produced by a royal committee, established the definitive text of the Bible, as it would be read in English for the next three centuries, a single work common to ten generations of English-language Christians.

随着这样一篇文本的出现，^15位演讲者识字能力的提升得到了认可和满足，他们对英语的使用方式也越来越有清晰明确的认识，甚至形成了一个具体的模式。这个模式很快将被传播到地球的各个角落。^†

With such a text justifying and fulfilling their increasingly widespread literacy,¹⁵ speakers more and more had a clear and distinct idea, indeed a single concrete model, of the English language in use. This model was soon to be transported to the uttermost parts of the earth.^†

什么类型的语言？

What sort of a language?

英语究竟变成了一种什么样的语言？这个问题后来变得意义深远，影响遍及全球。但对于普通的英语母语者来说，理解这个问题尤其困难。语言的架构之所以不可见，原因与魔术的障眼法如出一辙：出于习惯，人们的注意力都集中在表面现象上，而非其背后的运作方式。即便有人指出了运作方式，诗人描绘了技艺，评论家分析了文本的构成，人们仍然倾向于认为声音与词语、短语与对象、话语与思想之间的联系要么显而易见，要么完全神秘莫测。如果说语言的理性自有其道理，那么文学的心灵对此却知之甚少，也毫不在意。说话者和写作者、听众和读者，都巧妙地、往往凭直觉处理着他们普遍接受和认可的结果，而这种媒介在很大程度上未经分析——就像他们呼吸、消化和调节体温一样^。

What kind of a language had English become? This was to become a question fraught with global implications. But it is a particularly hard one for an ordinary native speaker of the language to appreciate. The architecture of a language is invisible for the same reason that a conjuring trick deceives: by force of habit, everyone’s attention is on the apparent business in hand, not its means of execution. Even when the means is singled out, and a poet describes his craft, or a critic draws attention to the composition of a text, there is still a tendency to take the links between sounds and word, phrase and object, utterance and thought as either too obvious to mention, or totally mysterious. If language head has its reasons, the literary heart knows little of them, and cares less. Speakers and writers, listeners and readers deal deftly, and often intuitively, with outcomes they all accept and recognise, in a medium that is largely unanalysed—much as they breathe, digest and regulate their body temperatures.^*

然而，英语具有一些独特的属性，使其成为独一无二的语言。其中大部分属性在十六世纪就已经存在了。从世界丰富的视角来看，英语是一种拥有非常广泛且截然不同的元音和双元音的语言（例如，在英国标准英语中，mat、met、mitt、motte、mutt、put、mart、mate、meet、might、moat、moot、mute、mouth、moist，以及mere、mire、flower、more、moor和immure），而辅音的范围则相对有限（bun、pun、spun、dun、ton、stun、con、gone、scone、chin、gin、Hun、train、drain、son、shin、led、red、bum、bun和bung，后来又增加了zoom和leisure），尽管考虑到允许的组合，这些就变得更具挑战性了：想想scrounged、widths、strengths、fifths、sixths、sevenths、eighths、shrinks、mostly、thrust、scripture、contemptibly、constraints、spindly、adze和stupid。它的一些语音规则会让母语者感到惊讶，因为它们与拼写无关，因此在学校里很少被提及：例如，元音的长度完全取决于音节中的最后一个辅音，而与元音本身无关：mat、mace、mitt、right、rot、lout、motes、route、kilt、health和Alf 的元音都很短，而mad、maze、mid、ride、rod、loud、modes、rude、killed、delve和pals 的元音都很长；或者，区分pin和bin、tab和dab的关键气流在spin和stab中实际上缺失——因此从语音学的角度来看，它们可能更适合写成“sbin”和“sdab”。英语的重音规则很复杂（例如 sweet sixtéen，但 síxteen swéet lámbs），但对于理解流畅的口语至关重要；而且整个句子的语调模式也多种多样。

Nevertheless, there are properties of English that make it the language it is, and no other. Most of these were already present in the sixteenth century. From the perspective of the world’s plenty, it is a language with a very wide range of distinctly different vowels and diphthongs (e.g., in the British standard, mat, met, mitt, motte, mutt, put, mart, mate, meet, might, moat, moot, mute, mouth, moist, as well as mere, mire, flower, more, moor and immure) and relatively more restricted range of consonant sounds (bun, pun, spun, dun, ton, stun, con, gone, scone, chin, gin, Hun, train, drain, son, shin, led, red, bum, bun and bung, with zoom and leisure added later), although these have become more challenging when account is taken of the combinations allowed: consider scrounged, widths, strengths, fifths, sixths, sevenths, eighths, shrinks, mostly, thrust, scripture, contemptibly, constraints, spindly, adze and stupid. Some of the rules of its sound system come as a surprise to native speakers, since they have no role in the spelling, and so are seldom mentioned at school: for example, that the length of the vowels has everything to do with the last consonant in a syllable, and nothing to do with the vowel itself: mat, mace, mitt, right, rot, lout, motes, route, kilt, health and Alf all have short vowels, while mad, maze, mid, ride, rod, loud, modes, rude, killed, delve and pals all have long ones; or that the crucial puff of air that distinguishes, say, pin from bin, and tab from dab, is actually missing in spin and stab—so from a phonetic point of view, they might with more justice be written ’sbin’ and ’sdab’. The stress rules of English are complex (e.g. sweet sixtéen, but síxteen swéet lámbs), but are essential for the understanding of fluent speech; and intonation patterns for whole sentences are also highly various.

英语单词的结构相当简单明了：古英语的词形变化系统（类似于拉丁语或希腊语）早已失传，大多数单词要么结构简单，要么结构清晰，仅由词干加上少量前缀和后缀构成。^*英语语法的不规则性主要体现在后缀应用于特定单词的细节上（例如，不是 man+s 而是men，不是 strike+d 而是strike）。主要动词可以与一系列被称为助动词和情态动词的短动词连用（例如 be、have、do、shall、will、can、may、must），在较为复杂的语境下，这些短动词的用法可能有所不同（例如，He has been took for a ride, hasn't he? They have too, haven't they?但Everybody seem to have, don't they?）。词序至关重要。在简单句中，词序相当固定，为主语-谓语-宾语（You saw a tiger），但在疑问句和更复杂的句子中，会出现大量的变体和细微差别。Who saw a tiger?仍然是SVO结构，但接下来就精彩纷呈了：我见过这么大的老虎！（OSV），我从未见过这么大的老虎（Aux-SVO），你见过老虎吗？（Aux-SVO），你看到了什么？（O-Aux-SV），你认为你看到了什么？（O-Aux-SVSV），你认为是什么看到了你？（S-Aux-SVVO）。这种语序的变换虽然在日耳曼语族中很常见，但却超出了希腊罗马时期所发展的语法体系的范畴，因此也超出了中世纪和近代早期欧洲的语法教学范畴。事实上，直到20世纪50年代，理论语言学家才找到合适的分析方法。毫不奇怪，也正是在那时，英语才成为理论语言学的主要研究对象。

The structure of English words is fairly straightforward: the inflexion system of Old English, reminiscent of Latin or Greek, has long been lost, and most words are either simple, or clearly composed of stem with a few prefixes and suffixes.^* Irregularity in English grammar mostly concerns the details of how suffixes are applied to particular words (not man+s but men, not strike+d but struck). Main verbs may appear with sequences of smaller verbs called auxiliaries and modals (be, have, do, shall, will, can, may, must), which may be mirrored under rather complex conditions (e.g., He has been taken for a ride, hasn’t he? They have too, haven’t they? but Everybody seems to have, don’t they?) Word order is crucial. In the simple sentence it is fairly rigidly Subject-Verb-Object (You saw a tiger), but a plethora of variations and nuances arise in questions and more complex sentences. Who saw a tiger? is still S-V-O, but then the fun begins: Such a tiger I saw! (O-S-V), Never have I seen such a tiger (Aux-S-V-O), Did you see a tiger? (Aux-S-V-O), What did you see? (O-Aux-S-V), What do you think you saw? (O-Aux-S-V-S-V), What do you think saw you? (S-Aux-S-V-V-O). This juggling with word order, though common in Germanic languages, was beyond the ken of grammar as developed by the Greeks and Romans, and hence as taught in medieval and early modern Europe. In fact, it was only in the 1950s that theoretical linguists found a fitting means to analyse it. Not surprisingly, it was only then that English became the prime subject for theoretical linguistics.

如果将英语与其他已跻身世界语言行列的语言进行比较，语言本身最接近的当属汉语和马来语。当然，我们需要忽略英语词汇的主要来源：在其短暂的历史中，英语一直与法语和拉丁语保持着密切联系；自1500年以来，许多英语精英的教育也涵盖了希腊语。因此，这三种语言提供了英语词汇的绝大部分，无论是借词还是自创词。但是，当我们将词汇的起源——以及它们在纸面上的书写形式——放在一边时，一个令人惊讶的事实浮出水面：与英语最为接近的语言并非来自欧洲，而是来自遥远的亚洲。

If we compare English to the other languages that have achieved world status, the most similar—as languages—are Chinese and Malay. Of course, we need to discount the main sources of its vocabulary: English has been in close touch all its short life with French and Latin; and since 1500 the education of very many of its elite speakers has involved Greek too. As a result these three languages have provided the vast majority of the words that have come into the language, whether borrowed or invented. But when the origins of its words—and hence their written look on the page—is set to one side, the amazing fact emerges that the closest parallels to English come not from Europe but from the far east of Asia.

与英语一样，汉语和马来语的语序是主谓宾，动词和名词的词形变化很少。词语本身很简单，复杂的含义是通过组合不同的词语组合而成的。相比之下，我们讨论过的所有其他语言都具有高度的词形变化，尽管葡萄牙语在其亚洲扎根时，大部分词形变化已被剥离。

Like English, Chinese and Malay have Subject-Verb-Object word order, and very little in the way of verb or noun inflexion. Words are simple, and complex senses result from stringing them together. By contrast, all the other languages we have considered have a high degree of inflexion, although Portuguese, in the form in which it established itself in Asia, has most of this stripped away.

这种特有的保守主义，因而也日益反语音化的拼写系统，是英语与汉语（尽管与马来语——无论使用何种书写系统——都不相似）相似的另一个方面。正如汉语（当然还有埃及语）所经历的那样，英语的口语生活与书面语传统之间的联系已经变得十分松散。诚然，单词的书写顺序仍然与发音顺序一致。^*但拼写并没有随着发音的变化而进行相应的调整：因此， gh仍然存在，这个字母组合仍然出现在许多单词中，但它的发音却与苏格兰语loch中的ch的发音 [x] 完全不同；因此，英语中元音的拼写才会如此奇特，例如mate、meet、mite、mote、mouth和mute这些词，如果这些字母仍然像十五世纪之前那样被模糊地赋予音值，那么它们应该被写成meit、miit、mait、mout、mauth和miuwt。而这些音值在其他所有使用罗马字母的语言中都基本保留了下来。由于拼写和发音之间关系的复杂性，至少在英国，直到最近，很大一部分小学教师仍然认为，在教孩子读写时，自然拼读法弊大于利：因此才有了臭名昭著的“看图识字法”，这种方法本质上是将每个单词都当作汉字来对待。

The peculiarly conservative, and hence increasingly anti-phonetic, system is another facet of English that bears a resemblance to Chinese (though not to Malay—in any of the writing systems that have been used to represent it). As has happened with Chinese (and of course Egyptian), the life of English as it is spoken has become only loosely attached to the written traditions of the language. True, words are still written in the order in which they are spoken.^* But spelling has not been revised to keep up with changes in pronunciation: hence the remains of gh, a combination of letters still found in many words, but nowhere keeping anything like its original pronunciation as [x], the ch in Scots loch; hence the bizarre spelling of the English tense vowels, seen in the words spelt mate, meet, mite, mote, mouth and mute, but which would be written meit, miit, mait, mout, mauth and miuwt if the letters were still being used vaguely with the values they had until the fifteenth century, values that they have largely retained in every other language that uses the Roman alphabet. As a result of the complexity of relation between spelling and sound, a large proportion of the primary teaching profession, in England at least, was until recently of the opinion that phonics are more confusing than helpful when teaching children to read and write: hence the notorious ‘Look and Say’ method, which essentially treated each word as if it were a Chinese character.

与汉语一样，可以说，对于学习者来说，英语的书面化时间太长了。

As with Chinese, one can say that, for learners, the English language has been literate too long.

向西进！

Westward Ho!

我四十年来所学的语言，

我的母语英语，如今却不得不放弃：

如今我的舌头对我而言，不过

是一把未上弦的提琴或竖琴；

又如一件被封存的精巧乐器，

或被打开后，交到一双

不懂如何调和和谐之手的人手中：

你已将我的舌头囚禁于口中，

用我的牙齿和嘴唇双重封锁；

而迟钝、冷漠、贫瘠的无知，

成了我的狱卒，伺候着我。

我已年迈，无法再对护士阿谀奉承，

也已年迈，不再是学生：

那么，你的判决是什么？不过是无声的死亡，

剥夺我舌头呼吸母语的权利？

The language I have learned these forty years,

My native English, now I must forego:

And now my tongue’s use is to me no more

Than an unstring’d viol or a harp;

Or like a cunning instrument cas’d up,

Or, being open, put into his hands

That knows no touch to tune the harmony:

Within my mouth you have engaol’d my tongue,

Doubly portcullis’d with my teeth and lips;

And dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance

Is made my gaoler to attend on me.

I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,

Too far in years to be a pupil now:

What is thy sentence, then, but speechless death,

Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?

（诺福克公爵被流放时）莎士比亚，《理查二世》，第一幕，第三场

(The Duke of Norfolk, on being exiled) Shakespeare, Richard II, act I, scene iii

诺福克的这段话堪称英国人面对学习另一门语言时近乎绝望的开端，如今这种绝望几乎已成为一种传统：还有什么比流放更可怕呢？当时的英语仅在不列颠群岛境内使用。这段话很可能写于1595年，当时不列颠群岛以外仅有一个讲英语的殖民地，即罗利于1586年在罗阿诺克建立的“弗吉尼亚”殖民地，而当时的英国人也不知道它是否仍然存在^。

Norfolk’s words stand as the first example of an Englishman’s despair, now almost traditional, at the prospect of having to learn another language: could exile hold any greater terror? English was then a language spoken exclusively within the confines of the British Isles. When the words were written, most likely in 1595, there had been only a single English-speaking colony outside the British Isles, Ralegh’s 1586 colony at Roanoke, ‘Virginia’, and no one in England then knew if it was still in existence.^*

渐渐地，英国旅行者学习其他语言将变得越来越没有必要，因为英语使用者将在世界各地建立新的定居点，而其中许多定居点将会扩张，最终与英国一起，成为地球上最大、最富有、最强大的国家之一。三个世纪以来，英国人建立定居点的动机多种多样：为了王国的荣耀、从海盗活动中获利、建立新的乌托邦、从农业或采矿业中获取财富、贸易、个人荣耀、传播福音的责任感、全球战略、军事胜利带来的意外之财，甚至最终还有一种教育当地居民的义务感。在这方面，他们与他们最伟大的前辈——葡萄牙人、西班牙人、荷兰人和法国人——截然不同，后者各自都只是出于上述动机中的一种或几种。从这个意义上说，英国人是欧洲帝国主义的普遍代表。^*而这些动机的多样性几乎可以归结为“根本没有动机”。 1883 年，公关人士约翰·西利爵士曾发表过一句名言：“我们似乎在一时糊涂的情况下征服并殖民了半个世界。” ¹⁶这很符合英国人对自己纯洁无辜的自负。

Little by little, it was going to become more and more unnecessary for travellers from Britain to learn other languages, because English speakers were now to spread new settlements around the world, and many of those settlements were going to expand, to become—with Britain—among the largest, richest and most powerful nations on earth. The motives for British settlements over three centuries were various: the glory of the realm, gains from piracy, founding new utopias, wealth from agriculture or mining, trade, personal glory, a stirring of duty to spread the gospel, global strategy, windfall spoils from military victories, even in the end some sense of obligation to educate the native inhabitants. In this, they were unlike their greatest predecessors, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the French, who were each moved by just one or a few of these. The British were in this sense the universal exponents of European imperialism.^* And the sheer variety of the motives could almost be parleyed into a claim of no motive at all. In 1883, the publicist Sir John Seeley was famously to claim: ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’¹⁶ This has well suited British conceits of their own virtuous innocence.

海盗和种植园主

Pirates and planters

英语首次跨越大西洋的传播，让人想起一千五百年前梵语在孟加拉湾的萌芽。那时，风流倜傥的海盗（sāhasikā）与正统的商人（sādhava）几乎难以区分（参见第五章“梵语的传播”，第199页）。英国是最后一个在大西洋沿岸国家寻求西方新财富的国家，而且起初，这并非易事。十六世纪，当西班牙从墨西哥和秘鲁的矿藏中攫取巨额利润，葡萄牙垄断印度洋贸易，甚至连法国都在探索圣劳伦斯河的尽头时，英国的亨利八世和伊丽莎白一世只支持过寥寥几次横渡北大西洋的探险航行，而且几乎一无所获，甚至连登陆点都很少。但弗朗西斯·德雷克发现了一条有利可图的航线，委婉地称之为“劫掠战利品”。从1573年起的十五年间，仅他一人就通过袭击西班牙港口、在公海上劫掠西班牙和葡萄牙船只以及在东印度群岛进行贸易，带回了价值七十五万英镑的战利品，相当于当时年税收的两倍；伊丽莎白一世分得的份额足以偿清1581年的国债，并额外提供了4.2万欧元用于成立黎凡特公司（该公司后来成为东印度公司的财务基础）。 ¹⁷而且他并非孤军奋战。从1585年到1604年，每年至少有一百艘船只出海劫掠加勒比海，每年至少掠夺20万欧元。 ¹⁸

The first extensions of the English language across the Atlantic recall the stirrings of Sanskrit across the Bay of Bengal a millennium and a half before, when glamorous sāhasikā pirates could scarce be distinguished from sādhava merchants (see Chapter 5, ‘The spread of Sanskrit’, p. 199). Britain was the last of the Atlantic-fronting powers to seek new fortune in the west, and it was not, at first, an easy game to break into. In the sixteenth century, when Spain was drawing vast profits from its mines in Mexico and Peru, and Portugal stitching up the trade of the Indian Ocean, when even France was exploring the extent of the St Lawrence river, England’s Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had supported a very few exploratory voyages across the North Atlantic which yielded nothing, hardly even a landfall. But Francis Drake had discovered a line that could be profitable, euphemistically known as the ‘taking of prizes’. In fifteen years from 1573 he alone had brought back, from a mixture of raids on Spanish ports, high-sea robberies of Spanish and Portuguese ships, and trading in the East Indies, booty to the value of three quarters of a million pounds, twice the annual tax revenues at the time; Elizabeth’s share was enough to clear the national debt in 1581, and provide another €42,000 to found the Levant Company (which went on to become the financial basis of the East India Company itself).¹⁷ And he was not alone. From 1585 to 1604, at least a hundred ships set off every year to plunder the Caribbean, netting at least €200,000 a year.¹⁸

但伊丽莎白时代的航行表明，补给线是任何长期远征中最薄弱的环节。即使是海盗活动，从长远来看也需要一个安全、易守难攻且能自给自足的基地，同时又要靠近行动区域。这一点在理查德·哈克卢伊特于1584年为罗利在弗吉尼亚新建立的殖民地撰写的招股说明书中得到了充分体现。在执行摘要中，^*在对“基督教福音的传播”以及西班牙对体面的“英国贸易……日益贫困或危险”的威胁进行了一番虔诚的阐述之后，他承诺“这次西行将为我们带来欧洲、非洲和亚洲的所有商品”；尤其重要的是，“5.这次航行将成为西班牙国王在印度的强大枷锁，也是我们每年可以随意扣押其臣民一两百艘船只在纽芬兰岛捕鱼十周或三个月的手段。

But one thing that the Elizabethan voyages had shown was that lines of supply were the point of greatest weakness in any long expedition. Even piracy, in the long term, calls for a secure base, defensible and self-sustaining, but close to the action. And this was prominent in the rationale offered in the prospectus to investors for Ralegh’s newly planted colony in Virginia, written by Richard Hakluyt in 1584. In the executive summary,^* after pieties about ‘the inlargement of the gospell of Christe’, and the Spanish threat to decent ‘englishe Trades … growen beggerly or daungerous’, he promises that ‘this westerne voyadge will yelde unto us all the commodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia’; most especially, ‘5. That this voyage will be a great bridle to the Indies of the kinge of Spaine and a means that wee may arreste at our pleasure for the space of tenne weekes or three monethes every yere, one or twoo hundred saile of his subjectes shippes at the fysshinge in Newfounde lande.’

从商业计划的角度来看，事情的发展并非如此。殖民地最初举步维艰，甚至难以自给自足，更遑论抵御印第安人的侵扰；它既无力也无力骚扰西班牙人，更遑论拥有船只。然而，哈克卢伊特的“种植”（planting）一词，最初只是“殖民地”（colony）的一个巧妙比喻，最终却变得非常贴切：弗吉尼亚殖民地在詹姆斯敦重建后，便依靠烟草的商业种植维持生计。尽管詹姆斯一世登基后，英国王室对海盗活动的资助就此结束，但这并非唯一一个最终通过商业农业获得成功的海盗基地。英国海军实力在整个十七世纪不断增强，英国得以占领加勒比海的一些岛屿，这些岛屿此前实际上是西班牙的内湖：其中最重要的是，牙买加于1655年被英国占领。起初，针对西班牙的海盗活动仍然是英国在该地区的主要活动。但英国人越来越注意到生产糖的潜力，这种亚洲作物是由葡萄牙人在巴西率先种植的。亨利·摩根，这位最著名的海盗，将他在尼加拉瓜、古巴和委内瑞拉劫掠所得的资金投资到牙买加购买土地；摩根最终成为了糖业大亨，并被授予爵位^。19

In the way of business plans, it did not turn out quite like that. The colony was at first hard put to it even to grow its own food, and survive the attentions of the Indians; it had no energy, indeed no ships, to harry the Spanish. But Hakluyt’s term planting, originally just an elegant metaphor for ‘colony’, became in the event very appropriate: the Virginia colony, once re-established at Jamestown, was to find its sustenance through the commercial plantation of tobacco. And although English royal sponsorship of piracy ended when James I came to the throne, this was not the only pirate base that came good in the end through commercial agriculture. British naval strength grew through the seventeenth century, and Britain was able to take possession of some of the islands of the Caribbean, until then really a Spanish lake: most importantly, Jamaica was captured in 1655. At first, piracy targeted on the Spanish remained the major British activity in the region. But increasingly, Britons were noticing the potential in producing sugar, an Asian crop that the Portuguese had pioneered in Brazil. Henry Morgan, the most famous pirate of them all, invested the proceeds of his freebootery in Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela to buy land in Jamaica; Morgan ended up a sugar baron, with a knighthood to boot.¹⁹

无论出于何种原因，土地的占有使得为欧洲市场商业化种植异域作物成为可能。英国的殖民地没有金银，但事实证明，向消费者而非银行家供货要有利可图得多。种植作物也意味着需要劳动力：如果这些劳动力是来自英国的契约劳工（最初大多数都是如此，尤其是在北美），他们自然会继续说英语；如果他们是从非洲西海岸购买的奴隶，他们会在抵达后学习英语，因为他们与家乡社区的所有联系都已中断。加勒比海岛屿的糖（后来是可可）以及北美大陆的烟草（后来是靛蓝和棉花）带来的收入，成为了大西洋两岸可持续发展的英语社区最坚实的基础。

The possession of land, taken for whatever reason, made possible commercial cultivation of exotic crops for the European market. There was no gold or silver in the British possessions, but supplying consumers rather than bankers turned out to be much better business. Cultivating crops also meant that a workforce was needed: if these were indentured workers from Britain (as most were at first, especially in North America), they would of course go on speaking English; if they were purchased slaves from the western coast of Africa, they would learn it when they arrived, since all links with their home communities were lost. The revenues from sugar, and later cocoa, in the Caribbean islands, and from tobacco, and later indigo and cotton, in the North American continent, became the firmest foundations of sustainable English-speaking communities across the Atlantic.

别人的土地

Someone else’s land

他们称古老的英格兰为Acawmenoakit，这几乎等同于来自彼岸的土地。他们很难相信水在三千英里之外。

They call Old England Acawmenoakit, which is as much as from the land on t’other side. Hardly are they brought to believe that water is three thousand English miles over.

…

Chauquock；一把刀。因此，英国人称Chauquaquock，意为“持刀者”；以前，石头、锥子、斧头和锄头都被用来代替刀。

Chauquock; a knife. Whence they call Englishmen Chauquaquock, that is Knive-men; stone formerly being to them instead of knives, awlblades, hatchets, and hoes.

…

温纳姆韦安；如果他说的是真话。纳罗根塞特湾的老萨奇姆，一位睿智而爱好和平的王子卡努尼库斯，曾在一次庄严的集会上，对我发表过一次庄严的演说，他用这个词说道：“自从英国人登陆以来，我从未允许任何人对他们不敬，也永远不会允许。”他反复强调这个词：“温纳姆韦安的英国人， 如果英国人说的是真话，如果他言之有物，那么我就可以安心入土，并希望英国人和我的后代能够和睦相处。”我回答说，我希望他没有理由质疑英国人的温纳姆韦安克，也就是忠诚，因为他早已体验过他们的友善和可靠。他拿起一根木棍，折成十段，列举了十个例子，每个例子都用一根木棍来指代，说明是什么让他如此恐惧并说出这样的话。

Wunnaumwayean; if he says true. Canounicus, the old Sachim of the Narroganset bay, a wise and peaceable prince, once in a solemn oration to myself, in a solemn assembly, using this word, said, ‘I have never suffered any wrong to be offered to the English, since they landed, nor never will.’ He often repeated this word, ‘Wunnaumwayean Englishman, if the Englishman speak true, if he mean truly then shall I go to my grave in peace, and hope that the English and my posterity will live in love and peace together.’ I replied, that he had no cause, I hoped, to question Englishman’s Wunnaumwauonck, that is, faithfulness, he having had long experience of their friendliness and trustiness. He took a stick, and broke it in ten pieces, and related ten instances, laying down a stick to every instance, which gave him cause thus to fear and say.

…

他们常常问我：“英国人为什么来这里？”他们又以自己为参照，说：“是因为你们需要火柴。”因为他们在一个地方烧光了木柴，需要风把木柴吹过来，所以他们就想追着木柴，为了木柴而搬到新的地方。

This question they often put to me: ‘Why come the Englishmen hither?’ and measuring others by themselves, they say, ‘It is because you want firing.’ For they, having burnt up the wood in one place, wanting draughts to bring wood to them, are fain to follow the wood, and so remove to a fresh place for the wood’s sake.

罗杰·威廉姆斯，《美国语言之钥》，1643年，^第20页

Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America, 1643²⁰

英语在加勒比地区的扩张几乎毫无阻碍。阿拉瓦克人和加勒比人中只有极少数在十六世纪西班牙的征服中幸存下来，因此，英国海盗、种植园主以及他们贩运的奴隶进入的，是一片空旷的土地。北美大陆的情况则截然不同。

The growth of English in the Caribbean had been achieved with little friction. Very few of the Arawak or Carib population had survived the Spanish takeover of the sixteenth century, and so the English pirates and planters, and the slaves that they imported, were entering an emptied domain. The situation on the North American mainland was very different.

在弗吉尼亚和马萨诸塞，这两个英国殖民者的首批桥头堡，仍然居住着相当数量的原住民。由于有鳕鱼渔民和其他探险者前来探路，他们对欧洲人已经有所了解。^*这对殖民者来说非常幸运，因为在这两个地方，正是依靠这些知识渊博的邻居的积极帮助，他们才得以度过最初的几年。在弗吉尼亚，约翰·罗尔夫（John Rolfe）于1612年迎娶了波瓦坦族酋长瓦胡索纳科克（Wahunsonacock）活泼的女儿波卡洪塔斯（Pocahontas）。罗尔夫开创了弗吉尼亚烟草种植的先河。† 这段婚姻使弗吉尼亚与波瓦坦族的关系一直保持良好，直到1622年；1616年，这对夫妇甚至带领一群弗吉尼亚人前往伦敦，觐见了詹姆斯一世国王。在马萨诸塞，两位会说双语的原住民——萨莫塞特（Samoset）和蒂斯昆图姆（Tisquantum）——在殖民者的最初几年里给予了至关重要的帮助。萨莫塞特曾向鳕鱼渔民学习了一些英语。蒂斯昆图姆的英语非常流利，他已经六次横渡大西洋，在英国待了九年，在西班牙待了四年，又花了一年时间绘制新英格兰海岸的地图，在1620年11月英国殖民者抵达前一年返回家乡。

In Virginia and Massachusetts, the first bridgeheads for English settlers, there was still a substantial indigenous population. What with visiting cod fishermen and other scouting voyagers, they were already to some extent familiar with Europeans.^* This was lucky for the settlers, since in both places it was only through the active help of these knowledgeable neighbours that they survived those first years. In Virginia, John Rolfe, who founded the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia, married in 1612 none other than Pocahontas, the spirited daughter of the Powhatan chief Wahunsonacock.† This kept relations with the Powhatan sweet until 1622; in 1616 the couple had even led a party of Virginians to London, where they were presented to King James I. In Massachusetts, the colonists were helped crucially in the first few years by two bilingual natives, Samoset, who had learnt some English from cod fishermen, and Tisquantum. Tisquantum was quite fluent in English, having crossed the Atlantic already six times, spending nine years in England, four in Spain and a further year mapping the New England coast, returning home just a year before the arrival of the English settlers in November 1620.

英国殖民者面临的任务与一个世纪前入侵墨西哥的科尔特斯和西班牙人所面临的挑战颇为相似：在别人的土地上建立统治地位。但英国人来到美洲的动机却截然不同。他们并非寻求黄金、皈依基督教，甚至也不是为了统治。他们寻找的仅仅是土地。自1583年汉弗莱·吉尔伯特为第一次失败的探险制定计划以来，这始终是吸引志愿者的主要动力。对英国人来说，建立“新英格兰”的意图非常明确，许多人甚至带着妻子和幼子一同前往，以此表达他们的诚意。

The task facing the English colonists was quite comparable to the challenge to Cortés and the Spaniards who had invaded Mexico just a century before, to establish themselves, as masters, in the midst of someone else’s country. But English motives for being in America were rather different. They were not looking for gold, converts or even dominion. Rather, they were looking for land. This prospect had been the chief inducement for volunteers, ever since Humphrey Gilbert’s prospectus for the first failed expedition of 1583. For Englishmen, the intent to create a ‘New England’ was quite literal, and many showed their earnest by bringing wives and small children out with them.

由于他们对当地居民毫无兴趣，只把他们当作不可信赖且可随意牺牲的帮手，因此，他们并不关心他们所觊觎的美洲地区并没有什么强大的统治者可以征服，也不关心——事实上——他们遇到的第一批居民所说的语言在当地乃至更远的地方都非常普遍：他们更惊讶的是，他们遇到的这种语言方言差异很大，这意味着即使是那些努力学习这种语言的人，当他们走得更远时，也很难被人听懂：

Since they had no interest in the inhabitants, except as untrusted and expendable helpmeets, it was of little concern to them that there was no major overlord fit for conquest in the part of America into which they had projected themselves, nor that—as it happened—the language spoken by the first inhabitants they met was actually very widespread there and far beyond: they were more struck by the fact that the language as they encountered it was highly riven dialectally, which meant that even those few who made the effort to learn to speak it could scarcely be understood when they wandered farther afield:

我曾到过我们这片土地上最荒凉的岛屿……我独自一人乘船而来，逆风而行；由于他们的方言和说话方式与他们不同，我几乎无法与他们交流；然而，在上帝的帮助下，我还是说了许多话……以至于在我离开时，许多人齐声问道：“哦，你什么时候再来，给我们带来更多关于这位上帝的消息呢？”

I once travelled to an island of the wildest in our parts … I was alone having travelled from my bark, the wind being contrary; and little could I speak to them to their understanding, especially because of the change of their dialect and manner of speech; yet much, through the help of God, did I speak … that at my parting, many burst forth, ‘Oh, when will you come again, to bring us some more news of this God?’

…

阿努姆； 一只狗……方言和标准语的差异非常大，即使相距三四十英里，正如这个词所显示的：阿努姆，考韦塞特方言；艾伊姆，纳罗根塞特方言；阿鲁姆，昆尼皮库克方言；阿鲁姆，尼普穆克方言^。21

Anum; a dog … the variety of their dialects and proper speech, within thirty or forty miles of each other, is very great, as appears in that word: Anum, the Cowweset dialect; Ayim, the Narroganset; Arum the Quunnipicuck; Alum, the Neepmuck.²¹

当时无人知晓，事实上，这个语系的成员几乎呈两条连续的带状分布，绵延2500公里，横跨北美大陆中部和北部，远至落基山脉山麓，从波瓦坦语到肖尼语，再到迈阿密语、伊利诺伊语、阿拉帕霍语、夏延语，以及从马萨诸塞语到阿贝纳基语、阿尔冈昆语^†、奥吉布瓦语、梅诺米尼语、克里语、黑脚语。在波瓦坦语和马萨诸塞语之间，居住着另一种相关语言——勒纳佩语的使用者。这些语言与英语截然不同，词汇多音节性强，且前缀和后缀繁多。但它们彼此之间却相当相似，一些动物名称便可证明这一点：“驼鹿”在阿贝纳基语中是mos，在迈阿密语中是moswa，在奥吉布瓦语中是mōns，在梅诺米尼语中是mōs； “海豹”在阿贝纳基语中是àhkik ^w，在奥吉布瓦语中是āskik ，在克里语中是āhkik； “野牛”在阿贝纳基语中是pēsihkó或wēihko，在梅诺米尼语中是pesοPhkiw ，在奥吉布瓦语中是pišikki，在克里语中是pisihkiw； “鹌鹑”（一种小型鸟类，^学名Colinus virginianus）在勒纳佩语中是pōhpōhkēs，在迈阿密语中是pohposisia。在马萨诸塞语圣经译本中，“鹌鹑”一词是poohpoohqu-tteh。22值得注意的是，在这四个例子中，只有一处真正借用了印第安语词汇进入英语：定居者此前从未见过pēsihkó，但他们仍然倾向于使用自己的语言体系，并用他们熟悉的类似词汇来命名。

Unknown to anyone at the time, members of the linguistic family in fact extended in two almost unbroken strips for 2500 kilometres, across the central and northern reaches of the continent as far as the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, from Powhatan to Shawnee to Miami to Illinois to Arapaho to Cheyenne, and from Massachusett to Abenaki to Algonquin^† to Ojibwa to Menominee to Cree to Blackfoot. In between Powhatan and Massachusett lay speakers of another related language, Lenape. These languages were very different from English, highly polysyllabic in their words, and with profusions of prefixes and suffixes. But they were fairly similar to each other, as a few animal names show: ‘moose’ is Abenaki mos, Miami moswa, Ojibwa mōns, Menominee mōs; ‘seal’ is Abenaki àhkik^w, Ojibwa āskik, Cree āhkik; ‘bison’ is Abenaki pēsihkó or wēihko, Menominee pesοPhkiw, Ojibwa pišikki, Cree pisihkiw; and ‘bobwhite’, a species of small bird (Colinus virginianus), is Lenape pōhpōhkēs, and Miami pohposisia. In the Massachusett translation of the Bible, the word for ‘quails’ is poohpoohqu-tteh.²² It is revealing that only in one of these four examples was the Indian word actually borrowed into English: the settlers had never seen a pēsihkó before, but they still preferred to stick with their own linguistic world, and name it for something similar that they did know.

殖民者对待印第安人的态度是，起初试图与他们和平共处，直到需要将他们驱逐出去，以便为不断扩张的社区提供更多土地。双方几乎没有和平共处，敌对行动迟早会发生；最终，新英格兰的原住民比墨西哥或秘鲁的原住民灭绝得更彻底、更迅速。然而，英国人从未像西班牙人那样，在探索任何新领土后立即进行军事征服。因此，英国当局从未像西班牙人那样对印第安人承担责任；他们也远没有像西班牙人那样努力劝化印第安人。只有极少数英国人会试图在精神上与原住民沟通，或者努力与他们建立团结。剑桥大学毕业生罗杰·威廉姆斯（1607-1683）和约翰·艾略特（1604-1690）便是其中两位。他们学习了当地语言，并出版了相关书籍：威廉姆斯的《美洲语言之钥》（A Key into the Language of America），以及艾略特的《印第安语法入门，或为印第安语言制定规则，以帮助那些渴望学习该语言的人，并促进福音在他们中间传播》（The Indian Grammar Begun, or an Essay to bring the Indian Language into Rules, for the help of such as desire to learn the same, for the furtherance of the Gospel among them）。 ²³威廉姆斯更像是一位政治活动家，因其观点而被马萨诸塞州驱逐，并在战争期间担任纳拉甘西特人的谈判代表；他的《美洲语言之钥》充满了关于土著居民的自然行为往往至少与自称基督徒的行为一样好的观察。艾略特则更像是一位传教士。自1646年起，他一直在马萨诸塞州传教，并在1663年之前将整本圣经翻译成了该语言。 ²⁴不到三十年，波士顿周围就形成了一圈城镇，居住着“祈祷的印第安人”。但到了下一代，当总部位于伦敦的福音传播公司提议印刷新版本时，却遭到了殖民当局的强烈抵制。一位清教徒神职人员回信说：

The settlers’ attitude to the Indians was to attempt to coexist peacefully until they needed to dispossess them to provide more land for their expanding community. There was little or no cohabitation, but hostilities followed sooner or later; and the natives of New England in the end died out far more thoroughly and rapidly than those of Mexico or Peru. Nevertheless, the English never undertook to subjugate the whole country militarily, as the Spanish did immediately in any new territory that they explored. As a result, the British authorities never felt responsible for the Indians in the way that the Spanish did; and there was far less effort to convert them. It was only an exceptional Englishman who endeavoured to reach the natives spiritually, or was concerned to try to build solidarity with them. Two such were the Cambridge graduates Roger Williams (16037-83) and John Eliot (1604-90), who learnt their local language, and published books about it: Williams ‘A Key into the Language of America’, and Eliot ‘The Indian Grammar Begun, or an Essay to bring the Indian Language into Rules, for the help of such as desire to learn the same, for the furtherance of the Gospel among them’.²³ Williams was more a political activist, expelled from Massachusetts for his views, and also acting as negotiator for the Narragansetts during hostilities; his ‘Key’ is full of observations on how the natural behaviour of the natives is often at least as good as that of declared Christians. Eliot was more a missionary. Since 1646 he had preached in Massachusett, and translated the whole Bible into it by 1663.²⁴ Within thirty years there was a ring of towns round about Boston, inhabited by ‘Praying Indians’. But in the next generation, when the London-based Corporation for Propagating the Gospel suggested printing a new edition, it was effectively resisted by the colonial authorities. A Puritan divine wrote back:

印第安人自己对此事的看法也存在分歧。虽然他们的一些老人仍然固守印第安传统（这不足为奇），但另一些人则迫切希望他们的族人能尽快接受英语教育。他们给出的理由非常充分；其中之一是，他们的印第安语非常贫乏（尽管词汇量很大！），而我们神圣宗教的伟大教义，用这种语言传达给他们，对他们来说，其表达方式几乎和完全用英语表达一样难以理解。但是，英语会立刻为他们开启我们所有宝藏的钥匙，使他们成为一座图书馆的主人，这座图书馆的藏书远非他们那野蛮的语言所能企及…… ²⁵

The Indians themselves are Divided in their Desires upon this matter. Though some of their aged men are tenacious enough of Indianisme (which is not at all to be wondred at) Others of them as earnestly wish that their people may be made English as fast as they can. The reasons they assign for it are very weighty ones; and this among the rest, That their Indian Tongue is a very penurious one (though the Words are long enough!) and the great things of our Holy Religion brought unto them in it, unavoidably arrive in Terms that are scarcely more intelligible to them than if they were entirely English. But the English tongue would presently give them a Key to all our Treasures and make them the Masters of another sort of Library than any that ever will be seen in their Barbarous Linguo …²⁵

到那时，马萨诸塞语使用者已经很少了：他们的主要部落在“菲利普国王战争”（1675-6 年）中几乎被全部摧毁，这是马萨诸塞印第安人对白人扩张的最后一次抵抗，而祈祷印第安人受到的打击尤其严重，他们对白人的忠诚没有得到任何回报，反而被驱逐到波士顿港的鹿岛，那里荒凉寒冷，并被流放到那里两年。

By then, Massachusett speakers would already have been few: their principal tribes had been all but destroyed in ‘King Philip’s War’ (1675-6), the last act of resistance by the Massachusett Indians to white expansion, and the Praying Indians were particularly hard hit, having gained no reward from their loyalty to the whites but a two-year deportation to Deer Island, barren and cold, in Boston harbour.

1670 年，弗吉尼亚、马萨诸塞（和康涅狄格）殖民地与第四个殖民地——卡罗来纳殖民地——合并。卡罗来纳殖民地由八位英国贵族根据查理二世国王的特许状建立。它最初的异域目的是以养蚕为生，但最终还是接受了种植水稻和靛蓝的现实。

The Virginia, Massachusetts (and Connecticut) colonies were joined in 1670 by a fourth, the Carolina colony, set up by eight English lords under a charter from King Charles II. It had originally had the exotic purpose to subsist on silk farming, but eventually reconciled itself to cultivation of rice and indigo.

昭昭天命

Manifest destiny

德克萨斯现在是我们的了。早在写下这些文字之前，她的制宪会议无疑已经批准了国会接受我们加入联邦的邀请；……其他国家企图插手此事，在我们和相关各方之间制造事端，其目的在于敌视我们，其公开目的是为了阻挠我们的政策，削弱我们的实力，限制我们的伟大，阻止我们实现其昭昭天命——即征服上帝赐予我们自由发展、造福我们日益增长的数百万人口的这片大陆……认为吞并德克萨斯是一种掠夺行为，是非法的、不义的——打着和平与法律的旗号进行军事征服——以牺牲正义为代价扩张领土，而正义本应属于弱者——这种说法完全是无稽之谈，也是对我们自身的不公。这种观点毫无根据……

Texas is now ours. Already, before these words are written, her Convention has undoubtedly ratified the acceptance, by her Congress, of our proffered invitation into the Union; … other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions … It is wholly untrue, and unjust to ourselves, the pretence that the Annexation has been a measure of spoliation, unrightful and unrighteous—military conquest under forms of peace and law—territorial aggrandizement at the expense of justice, and justice due by a double sanctity to the weak. This view of the question is wholly unfounded …

约翰·L·沙利文，《美国杂志与民主评论》，第17卷，1845年7/8月

John L. Sullivan, United States Magazine and Democratic Review, vol. 17, July/August 1845

于是，英国殖民者在北美东海岸建立了农业社区。接下来的挑战与其说是来自原住民，不如说是来自其他欧洲人。17世纪，英国人并非独占东海岸，而是不得不与北部的法国殖民者和南部的佛罗里达西班牙殖民者共享（见第413页地图）。即使是中部地区也并非毫无争议，因为在英国的马萨诸塞和弗吉尼亚殖民地之间，还隔着荷兰甚至瑞典的领土。所有这些地区最终都是通过宗主国为了自身战略利益而发动的战争才得以划分的。 1664年，荷兰人很快被驱逐出新尼德兰（包括宾夕法尼亚州、新泽西州、特拉华州和纽约州南部^*）；1763年，经过一个世纪的战争，法国人也被驱逐出新法兰西（加拿大东部）和密西西比河以东的路易斯安那。英国还曾短暂地从西班牙手中获得了佛罗里达的所有权，以换取其在1762年占领的哈瓦那；但在1812年战争后，英国又失去了佛罗里达。这些都是欧洲列强之间全球斗争的产物，但尽管如此，这些领土仍然向英语使用者敞开了大门，允许他们在此定居。

So the English settlers established themselves in farming communities on the eastern coast of North America. The next challenge came less from the indigenous peoples than from fellow Europeans. In the seventeenth century, the English did not have the eastern seaboard to themselves, but had to share it with colonists from France to the north, and Spain in Florida to the south (see map on p. 413). Even the centre was not uncontested, since there were Dutch and even Swedish territories intervening between Britain’s Massachusetts and Virginia plantations. In all these cases, the field was cleared by wars in the mother country’s strategic interests. The Dutch were expelled fairly briskly from Nieuw Nederland (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the southern half of New York State^*) in 1664, and the French, after a century of wars, from Nouvelle-France (eastern Canada), and Louisiane east of the Mississippi, in 1763. Britain also briefly acquired title to Florida from Spain, in exchange for Havana, which it had captured in 1762; it lost it again after the war of 1812. These were the proceeds of global struggles between the European powers, but nonetheless they opened the territories up to settlement by speakers of English.

下一个重大事件是1775年至1783年的战争，在这场战争中，英语殖民地脱离了伦敦的宗主国政府，宣布独立，即“美国革命”，并由此建立了美国。这在政治上意义重大，因为它为北美大陆的英国殖民地开辟了自主扩张的途径；从此，北美主要的英语强国成为一个“自带帝国”的国家，^其西部边疆不断后退，直至抵达太平洋沿岸。1777年制定的联邦制政府形式，对于这个边界不断变化的新帝国来说非常适用，因为新获得的领土逐渐从领地发展成为州。^*但它也对美国以外的语言产生了直接影响。许多无法接受新秩序的人北迁至加拿大，并在安大略省形成了一个重要的英语社区。在接下来的一个世纪里，这吸引了北美的主要移民潮之一，从而在与美国无关的情况下，极大地促进了北美英语人口的增长。

The next major event was the war from 1775 to 1783 in which the English-speaking colonies made themselves independent of their home government in London, the ‘American Revolution’ which created the USA. This was highly significant politically, in that it formed an autonomous source of expansion for the English colonies in the continent; henceforth the chief English-speaking power in North America was a state ‘with a built-in empire’,²⁶ and, as it transpired, a western frontier that constantly receded until it reached the Pacific coastline. The federal form of government that was devised in 1777 turned out to be well suited to this new empire with dynamic borders, as new acquisitions progressed from territorial status to statehood.^* But it also had immediate linguistic effects outside the USA. Many who could not accept the new dispensation decamped northward to Canada, and so created a significant English-speaking community in Ontario. In the following century, this was to attract one of the main streams of immigration into North America, thereby boosting its English-speaking population quite independently of the USA.

到1783年，距离英国在罗阿诺克建立第一个殖民地不到两个世纪，英语就已成为北美东部所有定居点的官方语言。当时，如今美国大陆（“下48州”）的四分之三仍名义上处于外国列强的控制之下，包括法国、西班牙，以及西北部的俄勒冈地区——英国。但仅仅两代人的时间，到1853年，整个地区就被美国占领。^*此外，到1890年，定居者已在该地区的各个角落建立了城镇和农场。格兰德河和希拉河以北，已无任何空间供一个重要的、独立的语言社群发展壮大。

By 1783, less than two centuries after the first English colony at Roanoke, English was the official language of every settlement in the east of North America. At that point, three-quarters of what is now the continental USA (’the lower 48’) was still under the nominal control of foreign powers, France, Spain and—north-west in the Oregon territory—Great Britain. But in the lapse of two generations, by 1853, the whole area was taken by the USA.^* Furthermore, by 1890 settlers had set up cities and farms in every part of the area. North of the Rio Grande and Gila rivers there was nowhere left for a significant, independent, language community to flourish.

这一切发生得如此顺利，仿佛只经历了几次重大的宪法改革。托马斯·杰斐逊总统利用拿破仑在法国短暂的霸权，于1803年购买了法属美洲剩余的领土——路易斯安那；仅此一项就使美国的面积翻了一番。接下来的两任总统，詹姆斯·麦迪逊和詹姆斯·门罗，从西班牙手中吞并了佛罗里达，并在1821年正式批准了这一决定；事实证明，驱逐塞米诺尔印第安人比驱逐西班牙人要困难得多，双方于1817年爆发的战争一直持续到1842年。其余大部分领土都是在詹姆斯·诺克斯·波尔克总统的任期内获得的。1845年，他接受了德克萨斯的加入，德克萨斯此前已脱离墨西哥——而墨西哥本身也刚刚脱离西班牙独立。 1846年，他与英国达成妥协，结束了双方就俄勒冈地区归属权的长期争端，从而确立了如今美国和加拿大之间的西部边界，即北纬49度线。吞并德克萨斯以及强加战争赔款导致了与墨西哥的战争：美国迅速赢得战争，并在此过程中占领了墨西哥城，但在1848年，美国宣布满足于吞并加利福尼亚和西部其他地区。 ²⁷美国本可以坚持吞并整个墨西哥，但最终认为那里外国人太多。正如参议员约翰·J·卡尔霍恩所说——这番言论惊人地违背了美国两百年的历史：“吞并墨西哥将是……吞并一个印第安民族的首次尝试；因为超过一半的墨西哥人是印第安人，其余的也主要是混血部落。我反对这样的联盟！我们……是白人的政府。” ²⁸

It had all happened so easily, in just a few major constitutional gulps. President Thomas Jefferson took advantage of the brief supremacy of Napoleon in France to purchase the remaining extent of the French Americas, la Louisiane, in 1803; this alone doubled the area of the USA. The next two presidents, James Madison and James Monroe, annexed Florida from Spain, ratifying the deed in 1821; it turned out to be harder to detach Seminole Indians than the Spanish, and the wars with them, begun in 1817, lasted until 1842. Most of the rest of the country was taken during the administration of a single president, James Knox Polk. In 1845 he accepted the accession of Texas, which had detached itself from Mexico—itself newly independent of Spain. In 1846 he split the difference with Britain to end a long wrangle over ownership of the Oregon country, and so created the present western border between the USA and Canada at the 49th parallel. The annexation of Texas, and imposition of war reparations, led to war with Mexico: the USA promptly won it, taking Mexico City in the process, but in 1848 declared itself content to absorb California and the rest of the west.²⁷ It might have held out for the whole of the rest of Mexico, but eventually decided it was too heavily populated with foreigners. As Senator John J. Calhoun opined—in amazing defiance of two centuries of American history: ‘To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of … incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours … is the Government of a white race.’²⁸

在这次迅速扩张中夺取的所有土地，当然早已有人居住，尽管这些土地几乎并非由从欧洲列强手中夺取的。那些生活在这里的人们——在英语美洲大约有两百个不同的语言社群，仅加利福尼亚州就有五十多个——发现他们与殖民者的接触遵循着相当可预测的轨迹。首先，在殖民者出现之前，神秘而致命的疾病就会侵袭部落。然后，当白人亲自前来与他们接触时，双方会尝试和解，这或许会促成一份条约，该条约将美国（或英国）政府与部落视为独立国家，划定边界并明确双方的义务。双方或许能和平共处一代人；但后来，随着越来越多的白人到来，并开始侵占部落的土地，部落会发现白人执行条约的意愿非常有限；部落会发现自己的领土遭到侵犯，生计被摧毁。这或许意味着战争，但最终部落总是会战败。白人数量太多，而且装备远胜于他们。很多时候，最后的阶段是白人单方面采取行动，将部落限制或驱逐到保留地，而这些保留地可能远在数千英里之外。这就是英国人对待美洲原住民的惯用伎俩，而且屡屡重演。

All the lands that had been gained in this rapid onset had of course long been populated, though hardly at all by the European powers from whom they were acquired. The people who had been there—some two hundred separate language communities in English-language America, and over fifty in California alone—found that contact with the settlers followed a fairly predictable course. In the first instance, before they even appeared, mysterious and deadly diseases would beset the tribe. Then, when the white man came to meet them in person, there would be an attempt at conciliation, which might lead to a treaty as between independent nations, the United States (or His Majesty’s) Government and the tribe, which would designate boundaries, and mutual obligations. There might be as much as a generation of peaceful coexistence; but later, as more and more white people arrived, and began to encroach on tribal land, the tribes would find that the white men’s willingness to enforce the agreement against their own people was highly limited; the tribes would find their territories violated, and their livelihoods destroyed. This might mean war, but ultimately the tribes would always lose it. There were just too many whites, and they were far better armed. All too often, the final stage was a unilateral action by the white men to confine or deport the tribes to a reservation, which might be thousands of miles away. This was the English way with the natives of America, and it was repeated over and over again.

这本质上是一种疏远和排斥的举措。尽管美国法律承认各部落是独立的民族，但并没有制定任何计划来接纳他们，也没有计划将他们纳入共和国宪法。相反，如果说有什么计划的话，那就是让他们的成员，无论是个人还是家庭，都成为共和国的公民和居民。自1816年起负责印第安事务的托马斯·L·麦肯尼声称：“我们要让他们成为公民”；而这一过程的一部分在于将他们的语言改为英语，“以此作为提升自身智力和道德地位的杠杆”。 ²⁹ 1819年3月3日，美国国会通过了一项法案，旨在通过教育“防止印第安部落进一步衰落和最终灭绝……教导他们适合自身情况的农业耕作方式，并教导他们的孩子阅读、写作和算术”。 1819年至1842年间，教育支出从1万美元增至21.4万美元，当时共有37所学校和85名教师。1881年颁布的《保留地寄宿学校条例》第41条规定：“所有教学必须使用英语。学生必须被强制用英语交流，屡次违反此规定的学生应受到适当的训诫或惩罚。应尽一切努力鼓励他们放弃本部落语言。” ³⁰

It was essentially an exercise in distancing and exclusion. Although US law recognised the tribes as distinct nations, there was no plan to accommodate them or to integrate them as such within the constitution of the republic. Rather, if there was a plan, it was for their members, individually or as families, to become citizens and householders of the republic. Thomas L. McKenney, in charge of Indian affairs from 1816, claimed: ‘We want to make citizens out of them’; and part of the process lay in changing their language to English, ‘the lever by which they are to elevate themselves into intellectual and moral distinction’.²⁹ On 3 March 1819 the US Congress passed an act to give education to provide ‘against further decline and final extinction of the Indian tribes… to instruct them in the mode of agriculture suited to their situation, and for teaching their children in reading, writing and arithmetic’. Expenditure increased from $10,000 in 1819 to $214,000 in 1842, when there were thirty-seven schools and eighty-five teachers. Rule 41 of the Reservation Boarding Schools (1881) read: ‘All instruction must be in the English language. Pupils must be compelled to speak with each other in English, and should be properly rebuked or punished for persistent violation of this rule. Every effort should be made to encourage them to abandon their tribal language.’³⁰

官方意图将北美原住民群体从独立实体中抹杀，最终并未实现。事实上，人口结构正在逐渐恢复。1999年，美国原住民（美洲印第安人、爱斯基摩人和阿留申人）人口估计为240万，高于1980年的140万。占总人口的比例从0.6%回升至略低于1%。 ³¹但从推广英语的角度来看，官方政策无疑是有效的，而且远比人口数量的锐减更难逆转。如今，英语的被动知识几乎普及。此外，人口普查数据显示，到1990年，只有不到四分之一的美洲印第安人在家中使用英语以外的语言。即使在母语使用情况最好的地区，例如西南部的纳瓦霍保留地，学龄人口中只会说英语的人数比例也在印第安人口增长的同一时期上升，从1980年的11.8%上升到1990年的28.4%。 ³²据报道，现在只有不到一半的纳瓦霍儿童还会说纳瓦霍语。 ³³在目前的情况下，北美任何一种本土语言的长期生存前景，即使与英语共存，也显得非常黯淡。

The official intent to eliminate the ancestral peoples of North America as separate entities has not, ultimately, been fulfilled. Indeed, the population pendulum is at last swinging back. In 1999 the indigenous population of the USA (American Indian, Eskimo and Aleut) was estimated as 2.4 million, up from 1.4 million in 1980. As a percentage of the total population, this represents a recovery from 0.6 per cent to just under 1 per cent.³¹ But viewed as a means for spreading English, the official policies must be seen as having been effective, and far harder to reverse than a sheer loss of numbers. By now, passive knowledge of English is almost universal. Furthermore, census figures show that by 1990 fewer than a quarter of American Indians were speaking any language but English at home. Even where native language use was holding up best, on the Navajo reservation in the south-west, the number of those among the school-age population speaking only English went up, in this same period of growing Indian numbers, from 11.8 per cent in 1980 to 28.4 per cent in 1990.³² Now it is reported that fewer than half of Navajo children still speak the language.³³ In the present situation, the prospect for long-term survival of any of North America’s own languages, even in coexistence with English, seems very bleak.

制胜之道

Winning ways

问问这些清教徒到了肯塔基州能期待什么，他们的回答是：土地。你有土地吗？没有，但我估计能弄到。你有钱买土地吗？没有。你见过那地方吗？没有，但大家都说那是好地……

Ask these Pilgrims what they can expect when they git to Kentuckey the Answer is Land, have you any. No, but I expect I can git it. have you anything to pay for land, No. Did you Ever see the Country. No but Every Body says its good land …

摩西·奥斯汀。1796年³⁴

Moses Austin. 1796³⁴

“土地是世界上唯一有价值的东西，”他喊道，粗短的胳膊愤怒地挥舞着，“因为它是世界上唯一永恒的东西，你们不要忘记！它是唯一值得为之奋斗、为之牺牲的东西。”

’Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything,’ he shouted, his thick, short arms making wide gestures of indignation, ‘for ‘tis the only thing in this world that lasts, and don’t you be forgetting it! ‘Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for—worth dying for.’

“哦，爸，”她厌恶地说，“你说话像个爱尔兰人！”

’Oh, Pa,’ she said disgustedly, ‘you talk like an Irishman!’

玛格丽特·米切尔，《飘》，1936年

Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 1936

此时，英语已在北美全面传播，我们不妨稍作停顿，思考一下这一惊人的发展。到1890年，英语已成为930.3万平方公里土地上的通用语言，这片土地的面积是英国本土面积的30倍。它远不止是一种方便的通用语或贸易术语，因为对大多数使用者来说，它是他们的母语；而对其他人来说，无论是在土著部落还是新近抵达的移民群体中，英语都在迅速取代他们所掌握的任何其他语言。短短一个世纪内，一种单一的语言文化就发展壮大，彻底压制了原本零星分布的200多种语言。唯一能在如此迅猛和广泛传播方面与之媲美的，只有穆斯林将阿拉伯语传播到中东和北非。其他一些例子——例如亚历山大将希腊语传播到波斯帝国，或者19世纪法语在北非和中非的传播——虽然同样迅速，但其传播范围远不及英语。拉丁语在西欧的根深蒂固的传播，以及汉语在东亚平原和山地的传播，都经历了数个世纪才得以实现。那么，英语语言社群的第一次爆发式增长又是如何发生的呢？

At this point, with English having completed its spread across North America, it is worth pausing a moment to contemplate this awesome development. By 1890, English had become the presumed common language over 9,303,000 square kilometres of territory, thirty times the area of the British Isles. It was far more than a convenient lingua franca or trade jargon, since for most speakers it was their first language; and for the rest, it was rapidly coming to replace any other language they knew, whether in indigenous tribes or among recently arrived parties of immigrants. Within a single century, a linguistic monoculture had grown to overwhelm a sparsely scattered cornucopia of over two hundred different languages. The only expansion comparable to this in its suddenness and its radical penetration is the Muslims’ spread of Arabic across the Middle East and North Africa. Others that come to mind—the spread of Greek across the Persian empire by Alexander, or that of French across north and central Africa in the nineteenth century—were as sudden, but far less penetrating; and the deep-set and permanent advance of Latin through western Europe, or of Chinese across the plains and mountains of eastern Asia, took many centuries to bring about. How was this first explosion of the English speech community possible?

为了给出令人满意的答案，最好将这个问题拆分成两个部分。一种欧洲语言怎么可能席卷整个北美？而且，在所有竞争者中，为什么是英语扩张了，而不是其他已经存在的欧洲语言？

In order to give a satisfactory answer, the question is best broken into two. How could a single European language take over the whole of North America? And why of all the contenders was it English which expanded, and not other European languages that were already in place?

早期英国殖民者来到美洲的动机很大程度上源于幻想。早期探险和定居航行的支持者们被描绘成能够开辟西北航道、与中国和印度进行贸易、拥有土地庄园以及建立安全基地以从捕鱼和海盗活动中获取财富的美好前景。然而，他们并未预见到投资的实际回报，这些回报主要来自毛皮贸易以及烟草和靛蓝等作物的种植。但从语言学的角度来看，重要的不是资本，而是劳动力。殖民地建立之后，人们前往美洲定居还有其他原因。他们大多是经济拮据，因此签订了契约劳工合同，服役四五年后才能获得定居权。另一些人则怀揣着理想主义的信念，前来建立新的社会：例如1620年来到马萨诸塞的著名清教徒分离主义者，以及随后几十年里众多清教徒的追随者。当时，英国正饱受内战、英联邦运动和复辟时期的蹂躏。许多人抵达后发现，这里遍布着英国人建立的定居点，拥有肥沃的耕地，而且大多尚未开垦。农作物一旦播种，便长势喜人，收成也销路良好。渐渐地，这些殖民地以物产丰饶而闻名，对于那些在英国前途未卜的人来说，移民似乎变得越来越有吸引力。他们启程前往西部，常常带着妻子和孩子。殖民地的政府从未压迫人民；但在1783年独立战争胜利之后，政治自由的曙光与唾手可得的财富一起，成为吸引人们的又一动力。

The first English colonists’ own motives for coming to America were largely the product of delusion. Backers of early voyages of discovery and settlement were courted with prospects of a North-West Passage to enable trade with China and India, of landed estates, and of secure bases to derive wealth from fishing and piracy. The actual returns on capital invested, which came from the fur trade, and from cultivation of crops such as tobacco and indigo, were not foreseen. But from the language point of view, the important thing is not capital, but labour. And after the colonies had become established, there were yet other reasons for people to go out to live there. Most often they were economically desperate, and went under contracts of indentured labour, serving out terms of four or five years before they were free to settle. Others came out to found a new society on ideal principles: such were the famed Pilgrim separatists who came to Massachusetts in 1620, and were followed by so many Puritans in the decades that followed, when the home country was racked by civil war, Commonwealth and Restoration. But what many found, when they arrived, was a string of English settlements where good arable land was available, and as yet largely unfarmed. Crops, when planted, flourished, and there were good markets for the harvests. Gradually, the colonies acquired a reputation for plenty, and emigration began to seem ever more attractive to those facing an uncertain future in Britain. They embarked for the west, often bringing wives and children with them. Governments were never oppressive in the colonies; but after the war for independence which prevailed in 1783, the new beacon of political liberty could be added to the attractions of ready wealth on offer.

正是这种大规模农业的引入，催生了成千上万个新农场，也正是这种农业模式导致白人定居者不断扩张，而原住民则因此遭受损失。这使他们有能力养育庞大的家庭，其规模远远超过下一代所需的人口数量：多余的人口则继续向西迁徙。在1650年至1700年间，这些英国殖民地的人口在两代人的时间里增长了四倍。此后三个多世纪，这种增长势头持续不断：惊人的生育率加上源源不断的欧洲新移民。

It is this introduction of wide-scale agriculture, from hundreds of thousands of new farms, which accounts for the spread of the white settlers at the expense of the natives. It gave them the wherewithal to raise large families, far bigger than what was needed to replace their strength in the next generation: instead, the surplus would head off farther west. The population of these English colonies quadrupled in the two generations between 1650 and 1700. And so it continued, unrelenting for more than three centuries from 1600: startling fertility coupled with an unceasing flow of new recruits from Europe.

在语言选择方面，这一时期前半段移民主要来自不列颠群岛这一点至关重要。17世纪约有22万人移民，18世纪的移民人数可能翻了一番。与接下来两个世纪涌入的4000万移民相比，这些数字微不足道。但首批移民的语言影响是决定性的：他们绝大多数来自英国和爱尔兰，讲英语。当然，并非只有英语：18世纪初，德国裔人口可能已占总人口的8%。然而，1794年，弗吉尼亚州奥古斯塔县的德语农民向美国众议院请求提供法律的德语译本时，却遭到了拒绝。当时的众议院议长F.A.C.穆伦贝格本人恰好是德国人，但他仍然拒绝支持这一请求^。

For choice of language, it turned out to be crucial that the immigration for the first half of this period had been predominantly from the British Isles. Some 220,000 had immigrated during the seventeenth century, and perhaps twice as many in the eighteenth. Small numbers, compared with the 40 million who would come in the next two centuries. But the first immigrants’ language influence was decisive: the vast majority of them had come from Britain and Ireland, and spoke English. Not exclusively so: at the beginning of the eighteenth century, already perhaps 8 per cent of the population were of German origin. Nevertheless, in 1794 German-speaking farmers in Augusta County, Virginia, were dismissed when they asked the US House of Representatives for a German translation of the laws. The Speaker of the House at the time, F. A. C. Mühlenberg, happened to be a German himself, but still refused to support the request.^*

自1820年以来，英语使用者在移民中实际上只占少数，仅占43%。^†虽然移民们在一些地方建立了社区，其中许多人都能听懂某种外语，但美国作为一个国家——或许是效仿了英国的传统做法——始终坚定地坚持英语为单一语言。尽管直到19世纪末，随着定居者向西迁徙，他们拥有大量建立新城镇的机会，但英语在这些新兴社区中普遍被接受为公共语言。

Since 1820, English speakers have in fact been a minority among immigrants, at 43 per cent.^† But although immigrants have here and there established communities where many can understand a given foreign language, the USA as a country—perhaps taking its lead from the traditional British stance—has remained resolutely monolingual in English. Despite the vast opportunity to found new towns and cities right up until the end of the nineteenth century as the settlers moved west, English was everywhere accepted as the public language in these new communities as they arose.

那么，为什么在最初的两个世纪里，北美殖民地主要来自英国呢？毕竟，英国并非第一个在美洲东海岸建立据点的国家：魁北克于1608年建立，成为新法兰西的首府，几乎与弗吉尼亚州的詹姆斯敦同时建成；而新荷兰早在1617年就在哈德逊河上游的拿骚堡开始建立，比清教徒在马萨诸塞州定居早了三年。甚至在1638年至1655年的十七年间，瑞典人还在特拉华湾建立了一个名为“新瑞典”（Ny Sverige）的定居点，而这片区域当时被荷兰人所宣称拥有主权。

Why, then, was it predominantly from Britain that North America was colonised in those first two centuries? Britain, after all, had hardly been the first to establish a foothold on the eastern American shores: Quebec was founded as the capital of Nouvelle-France in 1608 almost simultaneously with Jamestown in Virginia; and Nieuw Nederland had been begun at Fort Nassau up the Hudson river in 1617, three years before the Pilgrims settled in Massachusetts. For seventeen years, 1638-55, even the Swedes had maintained a settlement, Ny Sverige, at Delaware Bay, in the area claimed by the Dutch.

英国人的独特之处在于他们定居的愿望。从一开始，他们就寻求拥有自己的土地，以此谋生并养家糊口。无论他们跋涉多远，都渴望在与故土大致相同的条件下，秉持同样的宗教信仰来生活。由此形成的大家庭长大后，又会重复这一循环。正是这种动力以及后来证明的定居能力，使得在最初几代人之后，当与其他欧洲列强展开竞争时，英国人总是占据着更大的优势；这不仅转化为军队的胜利，也意味着他们能够迅速占领所获得的领土。

What distinguished the British was their desire to settle. From the very beginning, they looked for individual holdings of land, on which they could make a living, and bring up a family. However far they may have travelled, they aspired to do this on much the same terms, and with the same religious beliefs, that they had accepted in their original homes. The resulting large families would then grow up to repeat the cycle. It was the drive and then the proven ability to do this which meant that, after the first couple of generations, when competition arose with other European powers, the British were always present in larger numbers; this translated into winning armies, but it also meant that they soon occupied any territorial gains that they made.

五十年后，荷兰人的到来带来了真正的危机。在此期间，荷兰西印度公司（参见第十一章“荷兰入侵者”，第395页）从最初以海狸皮毛贸易站起步，发展到建立起以农场（bouwerijen ）为支撑的基础设施，^*最终发展到向富商提供准封建式的租约，称为“帕特隆船”（patroon ships），这一制度旨在确保殖民者以五十人为一组运送。直到1656年，当这种对富人的优待政策被搁置，公司开始向工匠和农民及其家人提供免费船票，并允许他们耕种尽可能多的土地时，殖民活动才开始蓬勃发展，人口从1648年的约两千人增长到1660年的一万人。但为时已晚。殖民者迟迟不愿响应公司的号召，加固他们的领地，而英国邻居的人口仍然是荷兰人的四倍。¹⁶⁶⁴年，尼科尔斯上校率领四艘战舰抵达新尼德兰，作为当时席卷全球的英荷战争的一部分，新尼德兰不战而降。九年后，新尼德兰再次易手，但最终在1674年被割让给英国。在结束战争的纯粹商业谈判中，这个主要以海狸皮闻名的北美殖民地，其价值甚至不及苏里南的甘蔗和东印度群岛伦岛的肉豆蔻。

The crunch came with the Dutch after fifty years. In that time, the Dutch West India Company (see Chapter 11, ‘Dutch interlopers’, p. 395) had gone on from a culture of trading posts for beaver furs, through a supporting infrastructure of farms (bouwerijen),^* to offering wealthy businessmen quasi-feudal tenancies called patroonships, a system designed to ensure the delivery of colonists in packages of fifty. It was only when this preferential treatment for the wealthy was shelved, and the company began to offer mechanics and farmers free passage for themselves and their families in 1656, with as much land as they were able to cultivate, that settlement took off, from an estimated two thousand in 1648 to ten thousand in 1660. But it was too late. Settlers were slow to follow the company’s urgings to fortify their holdings, and the British neighbours still outnumbered the Dutch four to one.³⁵ In 1664, when Colonel Nicolls arrived with four men-of-war, as one operation in the then global Anglo-Dutch war, Nieuw Nederland surrendered without a fight. It changed hands once more nine years later, but in 1674 was finally awarded to Britain. In the strictly business negotiations that ended the wars, a North American colony famous chiefly for its beaver pelts counted for less than the sugar cane of Suriname, and the nutmeg of Rūn Island in the East Indies.

法国与北美的关系远比英国复杂得多。法国的政策与英国截然不同：国王及其朝廷在建立定居点方面发挥了主导作用，但一旦定居下来，只要毛皮源源不断地运回法国，法国就采取了完全放任自流的态度。这导致了社会风貌的显著差异：年轻的单身男子独自前往新法兰西，成为“森林探险家”（coureurs de bois），即桀骜不驯的边疆开拓者，然后——如果他们最终定居下来的话——按照当地的习俗，与当地女性建立双语家庭，生下混血儿，这些孩子几乎不会认为自己是法国人，甚至可能根本不会说法语。这种做法使他们更受美洲原住民的欢迎，原住民在与荷兰和英国的战争中大多站在他们一边。但事实证明，这并非他们真正需要的支持。对狩猎所得（毛皮）的经济依赖，不利于土地的广泛定居和驯化；而依赖当地新娘——这自然导致许多土著男性无法繁衍后代——也意味着他们的人口增长停滞不前。17世纪70年代，法国政府试图通过提供“待嫁少女”（filles à marier）来干预这一进程，并取得了一定的成效（参见第十一章“法语国家”，第414页）。但即便如此，也无法与渴望土地的英国人的自然增长相抗衡。

The French connection with North America was a decidedly harder nut to crack. French policy had begun quite differently from British, with a strong lead from the king and his court in establishing settlements, yet a decidedly laissez-faire approach to life once there, as long as the furs continued to flow back to France. The result was a marked variance in social profile, with young single males going out alone to Nouvelle-France to become coureurs de bois, wild frontiersmen, and settling down—if they ever did—à la façon du pays, to found bilingual ménages with local women, producing métis children who would hardly consider themselves French at all, and might well not speak the language. This approach made them much more popular with the American Indians, who for the most part sided with them in wars with the Dutch and British. But this turned out not to be the support they needed. The economic focus on the proceeds of hunting—furs—did not make for widespread settlement or domestication of the land, and the reliance on local brides—thereby of course denying issue to as many indigenous men—meant that their population did not increase. The French government attempted to intervene in the process in the 1670s by providing a supply of filles à marier, with some success (see Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 414). But even this could not compete with the natural growth of the land-hungry British.

最终，结束法国直接介入美洲事务的，是近一个世纪全球战争后签订的《巴黎条约》。但如果说北美仅仅是战场和争夺的焦点，那么胜负早已注定。当时，北美大陆上英国人与法国人的比例超过二十比一。^*而二十年后，十三殖民地的英国叛军击败了英军，法国人却始终未能做到，这无疑证明了地面兵力的重要性。更令人愤慨的是，战争导致大量英国保皇党涌入加拿大，加上随后的移民潮排斥了法国人，使得英国臣民和英语使用者在法国曾经的殖民地中直接成为了少数群体。

In the event it was the terms of peace after almost a century of global war, the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which were to end direct French involvement in America. But if North America alone had been the battlefield and the prize, it had long been clear who would prevail. There were over twenty Britons for every Frenchman in the continent at the time.^* And if proof were needed of the importance of men on the ground, it was provided by the English rebels of the Thirteen Colonies twenty years later, who defeated the British army as the French never could. As a final insult, the infusion of British loyalists into Canada which the war caused, together with subsequent immigration that excluded France, meant that British subjects, and English speakers, quite directly minoritised the French in what had been their own colony.

英语国家称霸北美的最后一个真正障碍，来自殖民竞争的先行者——西班牙帝国。尽管西班牙和英国在十六世纪曾有过王室间的敌对关系，十七世纪英国海盗也在加勒比海地区暗中挑起争端，但英西两国政府在十七、十八世纪基本上都保持着一定的距离。后来，两国曾短暂交锋，但并未取得决定性胜利，并在1763年至1783年间多次争夺佛罗里达的控制权。真正的较量，则发生在两国各自的继承国——美利坚合众国和墨西哥共和国——之间，围绕着德克萨斯的争夺。

The final serious obstacle to English-speaking dominance of North America was provided by the first entrant to the colonial competition, the empire of Spain. Although Spain and England had been at royal loggerheads during the sixteenth century, and English pirates had pursued the quarrel unofficially in the Caribbean during the seventeenth, the British and Spanish governments had largely given each other a wide berth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Then they had come to blows briefly and inconclusively, and exchanged control of Florida back and forth between 1763 and 1783. The real reckoning was to come between their two successor states, the United States of America and the Republic of Mexico, over Texas.

英国移民的定居倾向再次引发了麻烦。摩西·奥斯汀发现了铅矿，并在1820年——就在西班牙宣布墨西哥独立之前——从西班牙获得了许可，允许他将三百个美国家庭带到这片此前被视为贫瘠之地的领土上。到1832年，他的殖民地人口已达约八千人，加上其他人的迁徙，盎格鲁人口总数达到了两万人。1833年，墨西哥城发生政变，安东尼奥·洛佩斯·德·圣安纳上台，墨西哥对德克萨斯的政策也随之改变。盎格鲁人的回应是宣布独立，并在抵御墨西哥收回领土的企图的同时，向美国政府求助。他们不得不熬过两届不友好的政府，但在1845年，波尔克总统同意吞并德克萨斯。波尔克如愿以偿地发动了战争，并最终通过武力夺取了他之前未能通过购买获得的领土，即希拉河以北的墨西哥太平洋沿岸地区，包括加利福尼亚。一举之间，美国的疆界便从东海岸延伸到西海岸。随后，新一轮盎格鲁-撒克逊人的大规模定居浪潮巩固了这一版图，尽管这一次的动机西班牙人非常能够理解：这些定居者不再是农民，而是淘金者，追逐着黄金的踪迹。

Once again it was the propensity of English immigrants to settle which led to trouble. Moses Austin, discovering deposits of lead, had acquired from Spain—in 1820, just before it granted independence to Mexico—a permit to bring three hundred American families into this territory, hitherto seen as a very barren area. By 1832 his colonies amounted to about eight thousand souls, and others had brought the Anglo population up to twenty thousand. In 1833 a coup in Mexico city installed Antonio López de Santa Anna, and reversed Mexican policy on Texas: the Anglos’ response was to declare independence and—while staving off Mexican attempts to reclaim the territory—appeal to Uncle Sam. They had to wait out two unsympathetic administrations, but in 1845 President Polk agreed to annexation. Polk got the war he wanted, and was then able to get by force of arms what he had been denied as a purchase, namely the Pacific stretch of Mexico north of the Gila river, including California. In one mighty throw, the USA’s bounds had been extended ‘from sea to shining sea’. Then a new surge of Anglo-Saxon mass settlement sealed the acquisition, though the motive this time was one that the Spanish could very much appreciate: the settlers this time were not farmers but Forty-Niners, prospectors on the track of gold.

如此广袤的地区——基本上相当于如今的整个美国西部——竟然如此轻易地易手，这表明西班牙在其三个世纪的统治期间，其存在是多么肤浅。正如法国人通过在加拿大和路易斯安那的毛皮贸易与当地土著达成了一种非侵入性的妥协一样，西班牙人最终在1769年至1823年间沿着海岸线建立了一系列天主教传教站，也仅仅与加利福尼亚国王的臣民建立了极其浅薄的联系。尽管如此，在神父们的庇护下，农业和畜牧业，以及皮革、牛角和牛油的重要出口贸易，曾短暂地繁荣发展。在1821年墨西哥独立后的最后几年，出现了一股更激进的定居运动，从1834年开始，大量土地被授予墨西哥人，这些人后来被称为“加利福尼亚人”（los Californios），这些非神职人员定居者很快就以残暴著称。但在政治上，向盎格鲁控制的过渡几乎是瞬间完成的。

The fact that such a vast area—essentially what is now the whole American West—could change hands so lightly demonstrates how superficial the Spanish presence had been in the three centuries of their control. As the French had reached a non-intrusive accommodation with the natives through the fur trade in Canada and Louisiane, so the Spanish, at last planting a string of Catholic missions along the coast from 1769 to 1823, had established only the lightest contact with the Californian subjects of Su Majestad el Rey. Nevertheless, agriculture and stock ranches, with a significant export trade in hide, horns and tallow, had briefly flourished under the auspices of the padres. In the very last years, after Mexican independence in 1821, there had been a movement for more radical settlement, and from 1834 a flurry of land grants were made to Mexicans who came to be known as los Californios, non-clerical settlers who quickly achieved a brutal reputation. But politically, the transition to Anglo control was almost instant.

从语言学的角度来看，情况远比想象中复杂。那些神父们，甚至加利福尼亚人，似乎都产生了相当大的影响。如今，在佛罗里达、德克萨斯和墨西哥北部被西班牙占领一个半世纪之后，仍有2000万美国公民，占总人口的7.3%，将西班牙语视为第一语言，而非第二语言。 ³⁶由于这些人几乎都居住在曾经至少部分属于西班牙领土的九个州之一^（总人口8300万），因此在这些州，四分之一的人仍然以说西班牙语为最乐意的语言。迁入的盎格鲁移民，在当地居住了五六代之后，已经明确确立了英语的主导地位：但西班牙语社群并没有消亡。事实上，它仍在发展壮大。

Linguistically, the situation has turned out to be far more ambivalent. It seems that those padres and even Californios had quite an influence. Today, one and a half centuries after the appropriation of Florida, Texas and northern Mexico, 20 million US citizens, 7.3 per cent of the population, still consider Spanish to be, not their second, but their first language.³⁶ Since almost all of these will live in one of the nine states^* that used to be, at least in part, Spanish territory (total population 83 million), the language situation there is actually one where one person in four is still happiest to speak Spanish. The incoming Anglo settlers, resident for five or six generations, have clearly established English as dominant: but the Spanish-language community is not dying out. Indeed, it is still growing.

转变视角——印度的英语

Changing perspective—English in India

舌头，作为开启心灵宝藏的钥匙，既是巩固社会纽带的媒介，也是解开内心秘密的器官，却在印度斯坦人和英国人之间失去了其应有的作用。大多数英国绅士不懂他们臣民的语言，而这些臣民又没有一个懂英语。因此，一群印度人与他们的英国统治者进行贸易往来，看起来就像是一堆挂在墙上的画作……

The tongue, which is the key to the treasures of the heart and mind, and which serves as a medium to strengthen the bands of society, as well as an organ to unlock the secrets of the heart, happens to be deprived of its office between the Hindostanies and the English. Most of the English Gentlemen do not understand the language of their subjects, and none of these last understand a word of English. It follows, of course, that a company of Hindians, having business with their English rulers, looks very much like a number of pictures set up against the wall…

西德·吴拉姆·侯赛因·汗，1789 年³⁷

Sied Gholam Hossein Khan, 1789³⁷

我既不懂梵文也不懂阿拉伯文。但我已尽我所能，力求对它们的价值做出正确的评估。我阅读过一些最著名的阿拉伯语和梵文著作的译本。我曾在国内外与精通东方语言的人士交流。我完全愿意接受东方学者对东方学问的评价。我从未遇到过任何一位东方学者会否认，欧洲一座藏书丰富的图书馆里，仅仅一架书架的藏书就足以媲美印度和阿拉伯的全部本土文学。事实上，支持东方教育方案的委员会成员也完全承认西方文学的内在优越性。

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one of them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.

托马斯·巴宾顿·麦考利（35岁），1835年³⁸

Thomas Babington Macaulay (aged thirty-five), 1835³⁸

一家商业公司

A merchant venture

英语和葡萄牙语之间存在着一个有趣而深刻的巧合。这两种语言都曾广泛传播，成为美洲殖民者日常使用的语言。而在南亚地区，这两种语言也同样发展壮大，最终在当地居民中的使用率甚至超过了从欧洲来到此地的少数水手、商人和士兵。我们刚刚看到，语言在美洲传播的关键在于使用者倾向于定居并繁衍后代，从而取代了人口稀少、技术发展水平较低的当地居民。而在南亚，情况则有所不同。南亚人口众多，长期以来习惯于外国商人，很少有外来者会在此永久定居。尤其对英国人而言，印度和其他亚洲殖民地始终是职业发展之地，而非生活之地；是驻地，而非家庭家园。与其他征服者相比，英国人对当地的控制更为谨慎和疏离。然而，矛盾的是，英国人却在亚洲的这些地区留下了印记，而且就目前来看，这种印记比任何已知的先前入侵者都更加根深蒂固。

An interesting and profound coincidence unites English with Portuguese. Each of the two enjoyed a wide and permanent spread as an everyday language of colonists in the Americas. But around southern Asia each language also expanded, ultimately used more among the local population than by the relatively few sailors, merchants and soldiers who came there from Europe. We have just seen that the property essential for language spread in the Americas had been the propensity for speakers to settle and raise large families, so displacing local peoples, who were thinly spread and technically less developed. Something else must have proved telling in southern Asia, which is home to massive populations long used to foreign traders, and where few of the incomers would ever settle permanently. Especially to the British, India and their other Asian colonies were always places for careers, not lives—for postings, not family homes. More than other conquerors, they remained reserved and distant in their control. Yet paradoxically, the British left their mark on these parts of Asia in their language, far more indelibly, as it now appears, than any known previous invader.

当考虑到语言在贸易中的作用时，与葡萄牙语的类比就站不住脚了。当英国东印度公司在印度建立其关键据点——马德拉斯（1654年）、孟买（1668年）和加尔各答（1690年）^* ——时，有效的通用语仍然是葡萄牙语，“大多数欧洲人首先学习的语言，以便彼此之间以及与印度不同居民进行一般性交流”。³⁹该公司储备了200本葡萄牙语词典，每个分公司或“工厂”都配备了一名葡萄牙语语言学家，即使伦敦的董事们致函孟买，要求对文件进行本地翻译，因为“印度使用的葡萄牙语与葡萄牙使用的葡萄牙语差异很大”。 ⁴⁰ 更非正式的是，许多商业活动都是用印度人称之为“Feringhee”的语言进行的，这是一种欧洲语言的非正式混合语：到17世纪末，在孟加拉方圆10英里内，葡萄牙语、丹麦语、法语、荷兰语和英语都设有工厂。当时英语仅在公司内部代理人之间使用，从未成为贸易通用语。实际上，交易通常是通过一位精通双语的印度商人进行的，这种商人在加尔各答和孟买被称为“banyan” ，在马德拉斯被称为“dubash”。^†

The parallel with Portuguese breaks down when the role of the languages in trade is considered. When the English East India Company acquired its crucial bases in India—Madras (1654), Bombay (1668) and Calcutta (1690)^*—the effective lingua franca was still very much Portuguese, ‘the language that most Europeans learn first to qualify them for general converse with one another, as well as with different inhabitants of India’.³⁹ The company stocked two hundred Portuguese dictionaries, and every branch office, or ‘factory’, had a Portuguese linguist, even if the directors in London wrote to Bombay requiring local translation of paperwork because ‘the Portuguese spoken in India differed so much from that spoken in Portugal’.⁴⁰ More informally, much business was done in what the Indians called Feringhee, an informal pidgin of European languages: by the end of the seventeenth century, Portuguese, Danish, French, Dutch and English all had factories within a radius of 10 miles in Bengal. English was at this time usable only among the company’s own agents, and never became a lingua franca for trade. In practice, business was usually done through the mediation of a bilingual Indian trader, known as banyan in Calcutta and Bombay, dubash in Madras.^†

显然，直到十九世纪，与印度当局（尤其是莫卧儿政府）的高层交往都是用波斯语进行的。公司代理人可以精通波斯语，尽管他们仍然会聘请一位“蒙希” ^（ munshi），^即集口译员、笔译员、秘书和语言教师于一身的“蒙希”。安托万-路易·亨利·波利埃（Antoine-Louis Henri Polier）就是此类专家的典范，他是一位为英国公司效力的法国人，也是沃伦·黑斯廷斯（Warren Hastings）的朋友。波利埃在十八世纪末出版了他的波斯语信件，这表明他不仅精通波斯语，而且也熟练掌握了与之相配的宫廷礼仪。 ⁴¹

It is also clear that until the nineteenth century higher-level dealings with Indian authorities, above all the Mughal government, were conducted in Persian.^§ Company agents could become fluent in it, although they retained the services of a munshi,^¶ a combined interpreter, translator, secretary and language tutor. A paragon of such expertise was Antoine-Louis Henri Polier, a Frenchman in the English company’s service and a friend of Warren Hastings, who published his Persian correspondence in the late eighteenth century. This shows him highly accomplished, too, in the courtly style that went with the language.⁴¹

基于此，真正的问题是：除了东印度公司“文员”（即职员）和驻扎在印度的英国军队之外，英语究竟是如何在印度传播开来的？毕竟，当时的情况几乎与荷兰人在东印度群岛的情况如出一辙：波斯语扮演着马来语的角色，乌尔都语扮演着爪哇语的角色，而葡萄牙语则被视为一种独立的语言。正如我们所见，荷兰人在最初不情愿地尝试教授自己的语言之后，便满足于维持现状：在荷属东印度群岛，荷兰语从未成为除殖民统治者之外任何人的语言（参见第十一章“荷兰入侵者”，第395页）。如果按照这种模式发展下去，波斯语至今仍将是印度的首选通用语言。

On this basis the real question is: how did English ever spread in India at all, beyond the transplanted society of the ‘writers’ (i.e. clerks) of the East India Company, and British regiments serving in the country? The situation, after all, was almost identical with that of the contemporary Dutch in the East Indies, with Persian cast in the role of Malay, Urdu as Javanese, and Portuguese as its very own self. And as we have seen, after a first half-hearted attempt to teach their own language, the Dutch had contented themselves with the linguistic status quo: Dutch never became the language of any but the colonial rulers in the Dutch East Indies (see Chapter 11, ‘Dutch interlopers’, p. 395). If this pattern had been followed, Persian would have remained the preferred common language of India to the present day.

英国人心中还有另一个动机，彻底浇灭了他们在印度更广泛使用母语的热情。正如一位英国议员在1793年所说：“我们因为在美洲传播教育而失去了殖民地；我们没必要在印度也重蹈覆辙。” ⁴²这种损失在18世纪末期仍然历历在目：康沃利斯勋爵，这位在1781年向乔治·华盛顿宣读英国投降书的将军，后来于1786年至1793年担任孟加拉总督。欧洲移民社区一旦站稳脚跟，就可能效仿美国，寻求按照自己的条件获得独立。基于这种逻辑，印度必须保持外国地位，尽管它必须对英国的商业活动保持可靠的开放；它不应该成为英国的新家园。1797年上任的总督理查德·韦尔斯利在1799年致信印度管理委员会主席：

And there was an extra motive in the back of British minds which drained any enthusiasm for wider use of their native language in India. As a member of the British Parliament put it in 1793: ‘We have lost our colonies in America by imparting our education there; we need not do so in India too.’⁴² This loss was very fresh in memories in the late eighteenth century: Lord Cornwallis, the very general who had delivered the British surrender to George Washington in 1781, went on to become governor-general of Bengal from 1786 to 1793. Settler communities of Europeans, if they became well established, might follow the American example, and look for independence on their own terms. On this reasoning, India must remain a foreign country, albeit one kept open reliably for British business; it should not be a new British home. Richard Wellesley, governor-general from 1797, wrote to the chairman of the Board of Control in 1799:

……关于将欧洲人驱逐出英国在印度的殖民地的权力……在我看来，这些权力仍然过于有限。

… with relation to powers of banishing Europeans from the British possessions in India … those powers appear to me still to be too limited.

居住在这些省份以及英属印度所有地区的非公司雇员人数与日俱增。这些人中不乏因困境或在欧洲的恶名而走投无路之辈。他们的职业主要集中在加尔各答，从事法律底层工作、经营商店和酒馆、公共娱乐场所，或管理报纸……在这些人中，尤其是在报纸编辑群体中，雅各宾主义精神最为强烈和大胆……

The number of persons [not in the company’s service] resident in these provinces, as well as in all parts of the British empire in India, increases daily. Among these are to be found many characters, desperate from distress, or from the infamy of their conduct in Europe. Their occupations are principally… at Calcutta, the lowest branches of the law, the establishment of shops and taverns, or of the places of public entertainment, or the superintendence of newspapers… Amongst all these persons, but particularly the tribe of editors of newspapers, the strongest and boldest spirit of Jacobinism prevailed…

^{在马德拉斯，那些并非东印度公司雇员的欧洲人所造成的祸害更为严重。}卡纳提克邦王公的顾问，以及他反对英国政府、压迫本国臣民的主要工具，几乎全部出自这类欧洲人。43

In Madras, the evil resulting from Europeans not in the Company’s service is still greater. The advisers of the nabob of the Carnatic, as well as the principal instruments of his opposition to the British government, and of his oppressions over his own subjects, are almost exclusively to be found among that class of Europeans.⁴³

因此，除了公司直接资助的活动外，英国在印度的殖民活动甚至不被英国当局视为可取之物。从1757年到1856年，这家名为坎帕尼·萨希布的公司（Kampanī Sahib）逐步扩张其金融、政治和军事控制，先是从孟加拉延伸至德里，然后横跨德干高原，最终覆盖了如今印度、巴基斯坦、斯里兰卡和缅甸的大部分地区。然而，该公司几乎没有传播的，是其董事们所使用的语言。

British settlement in India, then, apart from activities directly sponsored by the company, was not even seen as desirable by the British authorities. From 1757 to 1856, Kampanī Sahib, as it was known, proceeded to expand its financial, political and military control first across Bengal to Delhi, then across the Deccan, and finally to most of what is now India, Pakistan, Śri Lanka and Burma. The one thing the company hardly spread at all was a body of speakers of its own directors’ language.

新教、利润与进步

Protestantism, profit and progress

最终，英语的广泛传播并非始于东印度公司，而是始于英国新教传教士。^*东印度公司普遍对传教士在其领地内的活动抱有怀疑，其理由与排斥其他欧洲人的理由大致相同，而且更有力。1806年，东印度公司在马德拉斯附近的韦洛尔发动了血腥的印度军队兵变，这与克劳迪乌斯·布坎南（Claudius Buchanan）对印度教徒漠视基督教的抨击有关，他要求“采取一切手段来遏制我们本土臣民这种蔑视基督教的精神”；1808年，东印度公司不得不迅速查禁加尔各答附近塞兰坡（Śrirampur）浸信会出版社出版的一份题为《致印度教徒和穆斯林》的小册子。44 长期以来，在^印度宣扬宗教观点都是一个危险的地方，东印度公司对此风险十分敏感，因为这可能会对贸易造成严重损害。

In the end, the wider spread of English was begun not by the East India Company, but by British Protestant missionaries.^* The company was in general suspicious of missionary involvement in its domains, on much the same grounds—and with better evidence—as those on which they shunned other Europeans. The bloody mutiny of their Indian troops in Vellore, near Madras, in 1806 was associated with rants by one Claudius Buchanan on Hindu indifference to Christianity, demanding ‘every means of coercing this contemptuous spirit of our native subjects’; in 1808 the company had speedily to suppress a tract put out by the Baptist Mission Press in Serampore (Śrirampur), near Calcutta, ‘Addressed to Hindus and Mahomedans’.⁴⁴ India has long been a dangerous place for pressing a religious point, and the company was sensitive to this hazard, which could be highly damaging to trade.

然而，早在公司成立之初，其殖民地就已有教会人士驻扎。起初，他们和其他人一样，必须使用葡萄牙语工作，这一要求在公司1698年重新颁布的特许状中明确规定。 ⁴⁵但不久之后，他们便开始创办英语学校，主要面向公司雇员和仆人的子女——其中许多是孤儿：1715年在马德拉斯，1719年在孟买，1731年在加尔各答。这些学校的入学人数不断增长，随后数量激增，并成为学习英语的中心，附设印刷厂和图书馆。显而易见，在整个十八世纪，英语的影响力和权力都在迅速扩张：毫不奇怪，雄心勃勃的印度父母越来越希望自己的孩子学习英语，以便分享这种增长带来的机遇。大约在1780年，拉姆纳德（拉马纳塔普拉姆）的拉贾将自己的儿子送到位于马德拉斯以南坦贾武尔的施瓦茨传教士学校就读。施瓦茨的学校得到了该地区所有主要势力的支持：英国东印度公司、穆斯林统治者海德尔·阿里和阿尔科特土邦王公，以及坦焦尔的印度教王公^。46

Nevertheless, there had been churchmen at the company’s settlements from the earliest days. Early on, they had had to work in Portuguese, like everyone else, a requirement made explicit in the company’s renewed charter of 1698.⁴⁵ But soon they began to found English-language schools, primarily for children—often orphans—of company employees and servants: at Madras in 1715, Bombay in 1719, and Calcutta in 1731. The schools grew in attendance, then multiplied, and became centres of access to English, with attached printing presses and libraries. It was clear to anyone that English influence and power were growing massively throughout the eighteenth century: not surprisingly, ambitious Indian parents increasingly tried to obtain for their children a knowledge of English, to share in this growth. Around 1780 the raja of Ramnad (Ramanathapuram) sent his own son to Schwartz’s missionary school at Tanjore (Thanjavur), south of Madras. Schwartz’s schools were being supported by all the main powers in the region: the English Company, the Muslim Haidar Ali and nawab of Arcot, and the Hindu raja of Tanjore.⁴⁶

市场很快做出了反应。到世纪之交，遍布英国权力中心的“蘑菇学校”如雨后春笋般涌现，尤其是在加尔各答周边地区。这些教师大多是“落魄的士兵、破产的商人和挥霍无度的穷光蛋”，^他们大多是为了钱，但也包括一些受人尊敬的英国女士，例如巴特那郊外迪纳普尔的米德尔顿夫人，甚至还有著名的浸信会传教士、塞兰坡的威廉·克里。这些学校的目标群体是富裕的印度人，收费也很高。然而，教师们的态度却越来越居高临下。1801年元旦，D·麦金农牧师在给一位军官的信中揭露了他的动机：

The market soon responded. By the turn of the century, ‘mushroom’ schools were growing up in all the centres of English power, but especially round Calcutta. The teachers, ‘the broken down soldier, the bankrupt merchant and the ruined spendthrift’,⁴⁷ were in it mostly for the money, but they included respectable British ladies, such as one Mrs Middleton of Dinapur, outside Patna, and even the celebrated Baptist missionary William Carey of Serampore. They were aimed at prosperous Indians, and the fees charged were high. Nevertheless, the attitudes of the teachers were increasingly patronising. Writing to a military officer on the first day of 1801, the Reverend D. MacKinnon revealed his motives:

……我在任何阶层、任何个体身上，无论是在印度斯坦出生和接受教育的人，还是在整个亚洲，都找不到一丝古典品味、数学真理的知识，或是真正的道德或宗教原则。在我看来，这个黑暗种族过去是、现在仍然是，深埋于黑暗之中，如同机械般运转，完全缺乏那些赋予我们人类尊严和高贵气质，使我们有资格自诩与神灵同源的情感。

… I could not discover one particle of classical taste, of the knowledge of mathematical truth, or of genuine moral or religious principle in any class nor in any individual of the human species born and educated in Hindostán or even in all Asia. The dark race appeared and do appear to me, buried in darkness, moving like mere mechanism and utterly void of those sentiments which dignify and ennoble our species and entitle us to claim kindred with the Gods.

我的所有推测最终都简化为两个简单的命题。

All my speculations were at last reduced to two simple propositions.

1. 印度的土著居民既不能用自己的语言理解，也不能用现有的用这些语言写成的书籍理解。

1. That the natives of India cannot be illuminated by their own languages, nor by the Books now existing in those languages.

2. 因此，他们必须通过学习其他语言和阅读能够培养他们的品味并教导他们有用而扎实的知识以及真正的道德和宗教原则的书籍来启迪他们。

2. That therefore they must be enlightened by the acquisition of other languages & by reading Books capable of forming their taste & of teaching them useful & solid knowlege as well as genuine moral and religious principles.

早在1787年，我在库朱阿战场上布道之后……我便下定决心，要检验一下自己微薄的努力是否有效。我编纂了一部英语语法，其中的规则和说明均以波斯语书写。这本书于1791年出版，费用和风险由《加尔各答公报》的所有者哈林顿和莫里斯先生承担。我还费尽心力，花费巨资，将这部语法翻译成孟加拉语，但该版本并未出版。

So long ago as the year 1787 after preaching a Sermon on Christmas Day on the field of battle of Kudjuah … I seriously resolved to try the effect of my own feeble efforts. I compiled a Grammar of the English language of which the rules & instructions were written in the Persian language & character. This Book was published in 1791 at the expence and risk of the Proprietors of the Calcutta Gazette Messrs Harington & Morris. I also was at the trouble & expence of causing a Version of the Grammar to be made into the Bengal-language, but that version was not printed.

听到我提及此事，您或许会心一笑。当初我下定决心做这件事时，曾正式向政府申请允许人们走进这片土地，了解原住民的生活。但我提及此事，是为了表达我的感激之情，并见证我向政府和各界人士提出的所有公开和私下申请，都得到了明确的鼓励和支持。

You will smile when I mention, that when I resolved to make this effort, I formally applied to Government for permission to let in day-light on the Natives of this country. But I mention it, to observe & testify with gratitude, that in all my applications public and private to Government and respectable Individuals, I met with decided encouragement & approbation.

诚然，这些努力至今尚未产生任何明显效果；尽管我可以举出一些例子，说明有些母语人士在我的语法帮助下掌握了熟练的英语…… ⁴⁸

It is but too true that these efforts have not as yet produced any visible effect; altho I can produce instances of Individual natives who have acquired a competent knowlege of the English language by the help of my Grammar…⁴⁸

随着东印度公司的行为在伦敦受到越来越多的审查和控制，这些态度——通常为查尔斯·格兰特、威廉·威尔伯福斯和詹姆斯·米尔等有影响力的改革者所认同——逐渐成为政策的驱动力。1813年，下议院决议：“促进英国在印度的领土上土著居民的利益和幸福是英国的责任，并且应当采取措施，使他们获得有用的知识，并在宗教和道德方面得到提升。” ⁴⁹

As the actions of the East India Company were more and more subjected to scrutiny and control in London, these attitudes—often shared by such influential reformers as Charles Grant, William Wilberforce and James Mill—were becoming the motive force of policy. In 1813 the House of Commons resolved that ‘it is the duty of this Country to promote the interests and happiness of the native inhabitants of the British dominions in India, and that measures ought to be introduced as may tend to the introduction among them of useful knowledge, and of religious and moral improvement’.⁴⁹

十九世纪，随着英国在印度的政治控制不断扩大和加强，过去那种与当地人交往中秉持的自由放任的商业道德（其中包含着强烈的相互尊重），逐渐被一种毫不掩饰的欧洲优越论所取代，同时还伴随着一种不遗余力的努力，即努力将“黑暗种族”提升到敬畏上帝的英国人的道德和智力水平。

In the nineteenth century, as British political control expanded and hardened in India, the old laissez-faire business ethic in dealing with the natives, which had entailed a robust mutual respect, was increasingly replaced by an unashamed belief in European superiority, coupled with a duteous endeavour to bring up ‘the dark race’ to the moral and intellectual level of the Godfearing Briton.

1813年公司特许状中包含一项条款，规定“每年至少拨出10万卢比，用于复兴和发展文学，鼓励印度本土学者，以及在英属印度领土居民中引入和推广科学知识……”。但在此阶段，公司对传教士优先事项的传统不信任依然存在：这笔资金明确旨在“促进东方和西方科学的发展……作为一种可靠的平衡力量，抵御传教事业的洪流”。 ⁵⁰如何使用这笔数额不大的资金，最终对次大陆的语言发展史至关重要。

The company’s Charter Act of 1813 included the provision that ‘a sum of not less than a lac [100,000] of rupees in each year shall be set apart and applied to the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India…’ But at this stage the company’s traditional distrust of missionary priorities was still effective: the funding was explicitly aimed at ‘fostering both Oriental and Occidental science… a reliable counterpoise, a protecting backwater against the threatened deluge of missionary enterprises’.⁵⁰ The decision on how this small sum was to be applied turned out to be crucial for the language history of the subcontinent.

传教士们希望优先发展英语的愿望一直得到英国政府的支持，最终也得到了印度民众的支持。18世纪末，东印度公司在民众的强烈呼吁下，创办了一系列享有盛誉的印度学府：1781年为穆斯林创办了加尔各答伊斯兰学校（Calcutta Madrassa），1791年为印度教徒创办了贝拿勒斯梵文学院（Benares Sanskrit College），1800年为从英国来的文官人员在加尔各答创办了威廉堡学院（Fort William College）。所有这些学院都开设了一些英语课程；而威廉堡学院几乎没有其他语言。19世纪初，一些杰出公民也自发创办了学院，其中最著名的是1817年创办的加尔各答印度教学院（Hindu College of Calcutta），其宗旨是“首先培养孟加拉语和英语；其次是印度斯坦语……；然后是波斯语，如果愿意的话，作为一种对上帝的装饰性义务”。⁵¹拉姆·莫汉·罗伊被认为是该学派的领袖天才，他精通梵语和阿拉伯语，但他却大力呼吁人们更多地接触英语。

The missionaries’ wish to give priority to the English language was all the time gathering support from the home government, and at last from the Indians themselves. In the late eighteenth century the company, following popular urging, had founded a number of prestige colleges for the acquisition of Indian learning: for Muslims the Calcutta Madrassa in 1781, for Hindus the Benares Sanskrit College in 1791, and for incoming civil administrators from Britain the Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800. All of these had some classes conducted in English; and Fort William had little else. In the early nineteenth century spontaneous foundations were also made by eminent citizens, notably in 1817 the Hindu College of Calcutta, for ‘the cultivation of the Bengalee and English languages in particular; next, the Hindustanee tongue…; and then the Persian, if desired, as ornamental general duty to God’.⁵¹ Ram Mohan Roy, who is considered its presiding genius, was a scholar of Sanskrit and Arabic, but vociferous in his appeals for greater access to English.

……我们了解到，英国政府曾下令每年拨出一大笔钱用于教育其印度臣民。我们满怀希望地认为，这笔钱将用于聘请有才华、有学识的欧洲绅士，向印度土著传授数学、自然哲学、化学、解剖学和其他实用科学，因为欧洲人在这些领域的造诣已臻化境，远超世界其他地区的居民……如今我们发现，政府正在印度教学者的指导下建立一所梵语学校，以传授在印度广为流传的知识…… ⁵²

… we understand that the Government in England had ordered a considerable sum of money to be annually devoted to the instruction of its Indian subjects. We were filled with sanguine hopes that this sum would be laid out in employing European gentlemen of talents and education to instruct the natives of India in mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, and other useful sciences, which the natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world … We now find that the Government are establishing a Sanskrit school under Hindoo pundits to impart such knowledge as is clearly current in India …⁵²

一些新的政府学院也相继成立，通常开设东方学科，但在伦敦的压力下，这些东方学院获得了各种优惠，以改善其英语教学。随后，在19世纪30年代初，所有非英语科目的入学人数急剧下降，而英语专业的入学人数则相应激增。1834年的一次公众集会抗议政府对古典语言的扶持，并支持英语和地方语言^。53

Several new government colleges were also founded, often in oriental disciplines, but under pressure from London the oriental ones were offered various inducements to improve their English-language instruction. Then in the early 1830s came catastrophic falls in the enrolments for all non-English subjects, and corresponding surges for English. A public meeting in 1834 protested against patronage of the classical languages, and in favour of English and the vernaculars.⁵³

在此背景下，公共教育总委员会终于就如何使用公司每年用于促进文学和知识发展的十万卢比做出了姗姗来迟的决定。他们一反此前遵循宪章暗示、倾向于本土学习（以及将欧洲科学著作翻译成梵语、阿拉伯语和波斯语）的立场，于1835年3月7日决定，“英国政府的重大目标应当是促进印度土著居民学习欧洲文学和科学；所有拨给教育的资金，最好都用于英语教育”。 ⁵⁴

In this context, the General Committee of Public Instruction made its long-delayed decision on how to spend the company’s annual lakh of rupees to promote literature and knowledge. Reversing their previous preference, which had followed the hints in the charter, for native learning (and the translation of European scientific texts into Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian), they decided on 7 March 1835 that ‘the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India; and that all the funds appropriated for the purposes of education, would be best employed on English education alone’.⁵⁴

尽管当时这项决定仍存在争议，但最终证明其影响深远。^*《英语教育法》颁布三年内，政府英语学校的数量翻了一番还多。 ⁵⁵这仅仅是个开始。1857年，在英国的三大传统城市——孟买、加尔各答和马德拉斯——建立大学时，英语成为了它们的教学语言。与此同时，1835年的一项法令进一步强化了这种教育偏好：英语取代波斯语成为官方语言和高等法院的语言，而下级法院则使用当地方言。 ⁵⁶此前，梵语、阿拉伯语和波斯语仅保留了部分实用价值，类似于拉丁语在近代早期欧洲的存续：从此以后，就像启蒙运动后的拉丁语一样，它们将被归入纯粹的古典语言行列，成为文化遗产的象征，而非学习和研究的工具。英语曾经只不过是外国统治阶级的标志，如今却要成为向整个次大陆引入外国文化传统的途径。

This decision, although still controversial at the time, proved fateful.^* The number of the government’s English-language schools more than doubled within three years of the English Education Act.⁵⁵ This was just the beginning. When in 1857 universities were founded in the classic three British cities, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, English would be their language of instruction. And this educational preference was simultaneously reinforced in 1835 by a regulation that English was to replace Persian as the official state language and the medium of the higher courts of law, with lower courts using the local vernacular.⁵⁶ Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian had hitherto kept a half-practical value, comparable to the survival of Latin into early modern Europe: henceforth, like Latin after the Enlightenment, they would be consigned to purely classic status, symbols of heritage rather than vehicles of learning and research. And English, which had been little more than the mark of a foreign ruling caste, was now going to serve as the means for opening the whole subcontinent to foreign traditions of culture.

印度的基本语言平衡已经达成，并一直延续到1947年独立。实际上，尽管英语现在被列为印度的准官方语言，理论上地位低于十八种官方方言，但它一直沿用至今。英语在南亚地区普遍存在，是受过教育者的通用语：至于究竟有多少人真正懂英语，则很难说。过去二十年间，印度的英语普及率估计从3%上升到30%，但在该地区的其他邦则较低^。57

The basic language balance had been struck, and it persisted in India through to independence in 1947. And in practice, although English is now classed as an Associate Official language of India, theoretically inferior to the eighteen official vernaculars, it has persisted right up to the present day. English is universal in South Asia as the lingua franca of the educated: how many actually know it is harder to say, with estimates over the past twenty years rising from 3 per cent to 30 per cent of Indians, but fewer in the other states of the region.⁵⁷

另一个长期影响英语（尤其是在印度南部）的因素是缺乏其他通用语：英国的统治范围一直包括印度南部，后来又扩展到整个次大陆；但在莫卧儿王朝旧疆界以南，波斯语或印地语-乌尔都语从未被接受。如果印度，尤其是一个民主的印度，想要保持统一，就需要一种看似中立，或者至少对所有人都具有同等压迫性的通用语言。

Another long-term influence that favoured English, especially in the south, was the absence of any other useful lingua franca: Britain’s domain had always included the south of the country, and went on to encompass the whole subcontinent; but Persian or Hindi-Urdu were never acceptable south of the old Mughal boundary. If India, especially a democratic India, is to stay united, it needs a common language that seems neutral, or at least equally oppressive to all.

尽管初衷良好，却依然成功

Success, despite the best intentions

尽管英国征服南亚肯定不是西利“一时糊涂”所为，但英国语言在征服之后的传播几乎是偶然的。

Although Britain had certainly not conquered South Asia in Seeley’s ‘fit of absence of mind’, the spread of Britain’s language which followed on from the conquest was almost fortuitous.

英语在这里的成功并非源于北美，而是源于截然不同的过程；甚至与最初促成英国人和印度人接触的过程也大相径庭。在北美，英语的传播与当地居民保持着相当的距离，只是随着时间的推移，人口的过度增长和定居点的扩张逐渐取代了他们。而在南亚，英语的传播则依赖于招募当地精英。尽管公司早期有所担忧，但英语移民的数量从未真正增长到很高水平，也从未长期停留，而且如今大多已经离开。

The success of English here came about by processes totally different from those that worked themselves out in North America; and these processes were different even from those that had put Britons and Indians in contact in the first place. In North America, English spread while remaining quite detached from local populations, simply displacing them over time by overcrowding numbers and overwhelming settlements. In South Asia, English spread by recruiting the local elites. Despite the company’s early fears, English-language immigrants never became very numerous, never stayed for long, and by and large have all now left.

推动招募的重要力量之一是文化声望，这无疑是十九世纪英国的一大特征；而这种声望的吸引力远不止于最初在政府或商界谋求晋升的动机。然而，使印度成为英国领土的并非文化声望，而是东印度公司那些人的冒险精神。这些充满浪漫情怀的冒险家们唯一不能^逾越的底线是任何干涉当地宗教或与其密切相关的语言的行为。尽管新教传教士们也各有顾忌，但他们并没有这条底线，也正是凭借这一点，他们逐渐在英国本土赢得了支持。最终，公司高管们被迫冒险推行一项针对当地教育的强制性政策：可想而知，这项政策不仅没有引发骚乱，反而受到了（有识之士的）公众的欢迎，他们对此感到多么惊讶。印度学者发现，英语确实让他们接触到了印度传统之外的思想世界，包括法律、自然科学和社会科学、政治、文学，甚至偶尔还有宗教。

One essential force driving the recruitment was cultural prestige, definitely a British characteristic by the nineteenth century; and the attractions of this prestige went beyond the early motives of gaining preferment in the government or business. Yet it was not cultural prestige which had made India British, but rather the animal spirits of the men in the East India Company. The one point at which these romantic chancers^* drew the line was any thought of meddling with local religions, or the roles of the languages that seemed so closely associated with them. Protestant missionaries, for all their many scruples, did not have this one, and it was precisely on this point that they gradually won the argument back in the home country. The company men at last were forced to take the risk of a prescriptive line on native education: imagine their surprise when it not only did not cause riots, but even proved popular with the (thinking) public. Indian scholars found that English did indeed give them access to a world of thought beyond Indian tradition, in law, physical and social sciences, politics, literature—even, here and there, religion.

事实上，唯一感到失望的是新教传教士们。尽管他们在语言和文化方面取得了胜利，也欣喜地看到英语教育广受欢迎，但他们仍然未能从新英语使用者中找到多少皈依者。总的来说，对于英国统治下的印度人来说，现代欧洲文化的世俗内容远比任何更容易接触到的新教途径更具吸引力。从这个意义上讲，那些曾自信地预言“彻底的英语教育将完全颠覆印度教”的传教士们，⁵⁸被蒙蔽了。

In fact, the only disappointment was felt by the Protestant missionaries, who, having won the linguistic and cultural argument, and accepted the gratifying popularity of English-language education, still failed to find many converts among the new English speakers. By and large, the worldly content of modem European culture proved much more attractive to Indians under British rule than any new and readier access to Protestantism. In that sense, the missionaries, who had confidently predicted that ‘a thorough English education would be entirely subversive of Hinduism’,⁵⁸ were deceived.

即使曾经使其得以存在的征服早已结束，英语仍然在整个地区广泛流传。随着高等教育的发展（以及其他文化影响，我们稍后会谈到），英语很可能会继续在这里传播，或者更确切地说，是不断巩固和发展。因此，与北美英语的历史相比，印度和南亚其他地区的英语发展历程更能为未来英语的传播提供借鉴。

English has remained all over the region, long after the conquest that made its presence possible has been undone. English will probably continue to spread here, or rather to thicken, with the growth of higher education (and other cultural influences, as we shall see). For this reason, the growth of English in India and the rest of southern Asia provides a far better model for any likely future spread of the language than does the history of English in North America.

世界被风暴席卷

The world taken by storm

“北美讲英语。”

’North America speaks English.’

据称，德国首相俾斯麦在1898年被一位记者问及他那个时代最具决定性的事件时，给出了这样的回答。

Answer attributed to German chancellor Bismarck, when asked by a journalist in 1898 to identify the defining event of his times

一个帝国的终结

An empire completed

这两种推广英语的手段——我们可以称之为美国式的“扫荡式”和印度式的“再教育”——在英帝国扩张至覆盖地球四分之一的版图时，必须二选一地应用于整个帝国。耐人寻味的是，这种选择与气候和人口数量同样相关：典型的——也是最终最具影响力的——定居者是农民，而欧洲农民实际上只了解温带地区的作物。在温带殖民地，尤其是澳大利亚和新西兰，英国的长期定居者逐渐成为人口的大多数，因此英语也成为了主要语言。但在热带地区，英国的活动仅限于政府、贸易和商业开发，英语的传播则更为表面化，主要影响当地精英以及与英国权力中心有联系的人群，其传播方式是通过学校教育以及逐步将当地人纳入英国政府和企业：这在大多数亚洲殖民地——缅甸、香港、马来亚、新加坡、沙捞越、文莱和沙巴——都是如此。

These two means to the spread of English—what we may call American sweep-aside and Indian re-education—were to be applied, one or the other, across the whole British empire as it expanded to cover a quarter of the earth. Revealingly, the choice was correlated as much with climate as population: the typical—and ultimately most influential—settler is a farmer, and European farmers only really know temperate-zone crops. In temperate colonies, above all Australia and New Zealand, British long-term settlers became a majority of the population, and so English became the principal language. But in the tropics, where British activities were restricted to government, trade and commercial exploitation, the spread of English was more superficial, affecting local elites, and those in contact with British power centres, through school education and gradual recruitment of the locals into British government and enterprise: this was the pattern in most of the Asian colonies—Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah.

在那些被殖民者席卷的国家，^*殖民活动主要集中在19世纪。据估计，当英国人在1790年代开始抵达澳大利亚时，那里居住着30万人（说着200种语言）；到1890年，人口锐减至5万人（只剩下150种语言）。他们的人口一直集中在东南部，就像今天的英语使用者一样：那里有水。同期，英语使用者从零增长到1850年的40万人，到1900年接近400万人^。59与美洲的情况类似，在最初几年之后，英国人并没有认真努力去接纳原住民，更不用说学习他们的语言了；即使是传教士，在建立非破坏性的联系方面也相当不成功。

In the sweep-aside countries,^* the action was concentrated in the nineteenth century. Australia is estimated to have accommodated 300,000 people (speaking two hundred languages) when the British began arriving in the 1790s; by 1890 they were down to 50,000 (with 150 languages left). Their population had always been concentrated in the south-east, just as the English speakers are today: that is where there is water. In the same period, English speakers went from nil to 400,000 by 1850, and nearly 4 million by 1900.⁵⁹ As in the Americas, after the first few years no serious effort was made to accommodate the Aboriginals, let alone learn any of their languages; even the missionaries were rather unsuccessful in making non-destructive contact.

在新西兰，尽管英国人在1770年发现这片土地时，居住着一个使用同一种语言——毛利语——的民族，但最终却重蹈覆辙。1840年毛利人和英国签订《怀唐伊条约》后，英国移民潮迅速涌入新西兰，在接下来的十年里增长了十二倍，到1850年从2000人增至25000人。在接下来的半个世纪里，英国移民人口再次增长了三十倍，这得益于大家庭的兴起以及源源不断涌入的怀揣希望的新移民：到1900年，英国移民人口已达到75万人。与此同时，在19世纪，毛利人的人口数量却从超过10万人锐减至42000人。尽管他们在英国人到来之前已经在这片土地上生活了一千年，但他们却无法与欧洲疾病抗衡，尤其是无法与适应温带草原环境的欧洲牲畜——牛羊——的高生产力抗衡。他们进行了顽强抵抗，但就像澳大利亚原住民一样，最终还是被击败了^。60

In New Zealand, although the British found it in 1770 held by a single people speaking a single language, Maori, a similar story ultimately played out. After the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was struck between the Maori and Britain, British immigration took off, growing twelvefold in the following decade, from 2000 to 25,000 by 1850. In the next half-century, their population grew thirtyfold again, now boosted by big families, as well as an unceasing flood of hopeful new settlers: by 1900 it had reached 750,000. In the same nineteenth century, Maori numbers sank from well over 100,000 to 42,000. They may have had the advantage of knowing the country for a millennium before the British arrived; but they could not contend with European diseases, and above all the productivity of European farm animals, cattle and sheep, evolved to thrive on temperate grasslands. They put up a bitter fight, but like the Australian Aboriginals, they were swept aside.⁶⁰

澳大利亚原住民和毛利人的人口在20世纪后期均有所回升，但他们在各自国家所占比例仍然很小：目前澳大利亚约有17万人（略低于1%）被认为是原住民后裔（其中4.7万人，占0.03%，懂一些原住民语言）；新西兰有超过31万毛利人（占8%），其中约7万人会说毛利语（占1.8%）。他们完全被现代英语国家澳大利亚（1850万）和新西兰（380万）所淹没，在这些国家中，他们仍然难以生存。 ⁶¹

Both Australian Aboriginal and Maori populations have rebounded in the late twentieth century, but their proportions in their own countries remain tiny: 170,000—a little less than 1 per cent—Australians are now reckoned to be of Aboriginal descent (47,000—0.03 per cent—with some knowledge of an Aboriginal language), and there are now over 310,000 Maori—8 per cent of New Zealanders—of whom some 70,000 speak the language, 1.8 per cent. They are simply engulfed by the modern English-speaking nations of Australia (18.5 million) and New Zealand (3.8 million) in which they still struggle to survive.⁶¹

在更北的地方，英语使用者真正来到东南亚是在1786年，当时英国东印度公司获得了槟城——一个位于吉打州附近的小岛，主要用作海军维修基地。^*当时康沃利斯勋爵仍是总督，他一如既往地极力避免殖民，尤其不愿卷入任何政治纷争。但事与愿违；从1795年到1814年，英国人善待了荷兰帝国，而荷兰的首都则被法国占领。在此期间，槟城发展出了自己的商业活力，超越了古老的贸易中心马六甲。英国副总督斯坦福·莱佛士爵士曾反对归还荷兰殖民地，他认为槟城位于海峡之外，并不完全适合保护印度和中国之间蓬勃发展的贸易（主要是鸦片贸易）。通过外交上的巧妙手段，扶植一位曾被荷兰人轻视的马来苏丹，他于 1819 年为英国夺取了新加坡。当时新加坡只是一个相当小的定居点，但人口迅速增长到五千人，并开始发展成为新的主要贸易中心。

Farther north, English speakers came in earnest to South-East Asia only in 1786, when the English East India Company acquired Penang, a small island just off Kedah, largely as a base for naval refitting.^* Lord Cornwallis was still governor-general at the time, as keen as ever to avoid settlement, and above all any political involvement. But one thing led to another; the British kindly stewarded the Dutch empire from 1795 to 1814, while its metropolis was occupied by the French, and in the meantime Penang gained a mercantile life of its own, eclipsing the ancient entrepôt of Malacca. The British lieutenant-governor, Sir Stamford Raffles, who had opposed return of the Dutch colonies, felt that Penang, lying outside the Straits, was not quite right to protect the burgeoning trade (largely in opium) between India and China. Through an act of diplomatic legerdemain, installing there a Malay sultan who had been slighted by the Dutch, he was able to acquire Singapore for Britain in 1819. It was then a fairly small settlement, but the population instantly went up to five thousand, and began to develop as the new major entrepôt.

随后，英国人始终着眼于商业利益，发动了一系列阴谋和战争，最终将政治控制范围扩展至整个缅甸（1853-1886年）、马来亚（1883-1895年）以及婆罗洲北部地区（1888年）。更锦上添花的是，英国还在中国获得了自己的据点——香港（1848年，分别于1860年和1898年扩建）。语言方面的影响是，英语在东南亚和东亚地区的法律和行政领域得到广泛应用。其他国家很快也意识到了语言发展的趋势：新加坡的《海峡时报》于1845年创刊（当时发行量为38.6万份，而新加坡人口为300万），香港的《南华早报》于1903年创刊（发行量为20万份，而香港人口为600万）。

Subsequent intrigues and wars, always undertaken by the British with an eye to the commercial main chance, resulted in British political control being extended to the whole of Burma (1853-86), Malaya (1883-95) and the northern region of Borneo (1888). As icing on the cake, Britain also acquired its own base in China, Hong Kong (1848, enlarged in 1860 and 1898). The linguistic effect was extension of English for law and administration, all over these parts of South-East and East Asia. Others soon saw which way the language wind was blowing: the Straits Times of Singapore began publication in 1845 (current circulation 386,000, for a national population of 3 million), and the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong in 1903 (circulation 200,000, for a population of 6 million).

如今，在所有英国殖民地的继承国中，英语仍然是精英阶层的标志。人们往往难以得知有多少人会说英语。自1957年马来西亚独立以来，英语在该国的地位已成为一个政治争议话题；马来西亚积极推行马来语教育“标准化”政策，但与印度一样，英语在少数族裔群体中很受欢迎，这些少数族裔主要讲华语和泰米尔语，他们感到受到威胁。在缅甸（或更古老的名称缅甸），政府方面如今并不轻易承认英语的使用。自1997年香港回归中国大陆以来，英语在香港的未来尚不明朗，但1992年的一项调查显示，超过25%的香港居民具备一定的英语能力。在新加坡，1975年的一项调查显示，40岁以上人群的英语能力为27%，而15至20岁人群的英语能力则超过87%。 ⁶²

Nowadays, knowledge of English is still a mark of the elite in all the successor states of the British colonies. It is often difficult to know what proportion of the people speak it. Its status has become politically controversial in Malaysia since independence in 1957; there is an active policy to ‘standardise’ on Malay in education, but as in India, English is popular with the large minorities, here Chinese- and Tamil-speaking, who feel threatened by this. In Burma (or, to use its more ancient name, Myanmar) use of English is nowadays not readily admitted by government sources. Its future in Hong Kong, since 1997 returned to mainland China, is obscure, but a survey in 1992 suggested that over 25 per cent had some competence in it. In Singapore, a 1975 survey put competence among the over-forties at 27 per cent, but among fifteen-to-twenty-year-olds at over 87 per cent.⁶²

在非洲，除了葡萄牙人和荷兰人之外，直到19世纪才出现主要的欧洲定居点。但当争夺殖民地的浪潮耗尽了可利用的土地后，英语在英国殖民地的传播遵循的是再教育模式，而非扫除模式。南非温带地区确实吸引了大量白人定居者，但随着英国领土向北扩张，白人定居者逐渐减少；而班图人本身也是相对较新的移民，他们很好地守住了自己的地盘。因此，南非有350万英语使用者，占总人口的9.1%，但即使将英语和南非荷兰语使用者（其中有100万人能同时使用这两种语言）加在一起，也只占总人口的22%。在更北的地方，以英语为母语的人（基本上是白人公民）的比例要低得多，津巴布韦为3%，赞比亚为0.5%。英语在东非是一种更为重要的第二语言；虽然母语使用者不多，但坦桑尼亚、肯尼亚和乌干达仍有5%的人使用英语，尽管斯瓦希里语是另一种通用语。当然，这个数字与接受英语再教育的亚洲国家非常接近；而且在所有这些国家，以及许多亚洲国家，英语仍然是官方语言。

In Africa, there were no major European settlements until the nineteenth century, except for those of the Portuguese and Dutch. But when the scramble for colonies had exhausted the available territory, the spread of English in British possessions followed the re-education pattern as against sweep-aside. The temperate parts of South Africa did attract large numbers of white settlers, but they tailed off as British territory extended northward; the Bantu population, who were fairly recent arrivals themselves, held their ground well. As a result we find 3.5 million English speakers in South Africa, 9.1 per cent of the population, but even grouping together the English and Afrikaans speakers, a million of them mutually bilingual, they amount only to 22 per cent. Farther north, the percentage of native English speakers—essentially white citizens—is far less, 3 per cent in Zimbabwe, 0.5 per cent in Zambia. English is a more significant secondary language in East Africa; there are few native speakers, but 5 per cent of Tanzanians, Kenyans and Ugandans use it, despite the availability of Swahili as an alternative lingua franca. This, of course, is a figure very comparable to countries of Asia that accepted reeducation; and in all these countries, as in so many Asian ones, English remains as an official language.

非洲另一大片昔日英国殖民地位于西部，从喀麦隆沿海岸线延伸至尼日利亚、加纳、塞拉利昂和冈比亚。利比里亚也位于这一区域，它与英语有着千丝万缕的联系，但其建立的初衷是为了安置来自美国的获释奴隶。这些国家的历史各不相同，但它们的共同之处在于，当地的气候历来不利于白人定居。尽管英语均为官方语言，但似乎只有极少数人（约占总人口的5%）会说英语。由于这些国家都是多语种国家，另一种广泛使用的交流方式是使用以英语为基础的克里奥尔语，例如尼日利亚的尼日利亚皮钦语、塞拉利昂的克里奥语和利比里亚的利比里亚英语。 ⁶³

The other major area of old British colonies in Africa is the west, from Cameroon out along the coast to Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. In this area also is Liberia, another country with English-speaking links, but in this case through its foundation as a preserve for freed slaves from the United States of America. They all have different histories; but they share the fact that their climate has always discouraged white settlement. All define English as an official language, but it appears that only a smallish minority of their populations, again in the region of 5 per cent, are actually speakers. Since all the countries are highly multilingual, another widespread means for communication is the use of English-based creóles, such as Nigerian Pidgin in Nigeria, Krio in Sierra Leone, Liberian English in Liberia.⁶³

英语扩张的最后一个主要区域是散布在太平洋各处的岛屿。英国对该地区的殖民化比法国晚得多（参见第十一章“法语国家”，第417页）：斐济于1874年，吉尔伯特和埃利斯群岛于1892年，所罗门群岛于1893年，汤加于1900年。新几内亚的西部由荷兰保留，但德国和澳大利亚于1884年声称拥有其余部分。与许多德国在非洲的殖民地一样，新几内亚在第一次世界大战德国战败后落入英国手中，但具体而言，是澳大利亚人控制了该地。与此同时，萨摩亚的德国（西部）部分被划归新西兰。在新赫布里底群岛，英国传教士和法国种植园主从1887年起共同控制着该地区。

The last major area for expansion of English was into the islands dotted across the Pacific. British colonisation of this area came rather later than the French (see Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 417): Fiji in 1874, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in 1892, the Solomons in 1893, Tonga in 1900. New Guinea’s western half was reserved by the Dutch, but Germany and Australia claimed the rest in 1884. Like many German colonies in Africa, this one fell into British hands after the German defeat in the First World War, but in this case the hands were specifically Australian. At the same time, the German (western) half of Samoa was assigned to New Zealand. In the New Hebrides, British missionaries and French planters shared control from 1887.

除了在名义上与法国的影响力存在竞争之外，这些地区对英国帝国战略家来说都并非主要目标；岛民们基本上只能任由捕鲸者、海蛞蝓猎人、檀香木伐木工、甘蔗、棉花和椰子种植者，当然还有传教士们摆布。其结果之一是，大批南太平洋岛民被临时征召到昆士兰、斐济和萨摩亚的种植园工作，在那里他们学会了用皮钦英语交流。另一个结果是，大量印度人涌入斐济从事甘蔗种植和加工，以至于现在斐济近一半的人口都说某种形式的印地语。但由于长期大量契约劳工的影响，南太平洋地区已成为以英语为基础的克里奥尔语的主要分布区，其中两种克里奥尔语已被公认为官方语言：托克皮辛语是1975年独立的巴布亚新几内亚的官方语言，比斯拉马语是1980年独立的瓦努阿图（原新赫布里底群岛）的官方语言。这些克里奥尔语与传教士传播的英语截然不同。无论如何，正如人们所预料的那样，在通过再教育传播语言的地区，使用这些英语的群体在其各自国家都属于极少数群体。

None of these territories was of great interest to British imperial strategists, except in some notional competition with French influence; the islanders in general were left to the shifting mercies of whale and sea-slug hunters, sandalwood cutters, the cultivators of sugar cane, cotton and coconut, and of course missionaries. One result was the temporary recruitment of large gangs of South Sea Islanders to work on plantations in Queensland, Fiji and Samoa, where they learnt to communicate in pidgin English. Another was a vast infusion of Indians into Fiji to engage in sugar planting and processing, so that now close to half its population speak a form of Hindi. But as a long-term result of all those indentured workers, the South Pacific has become a prime area for English-based creóles, and two of them are now accepted as official languages: Tok Pisin is the language of Papua New Guinea, independent since 1975, and Bislama of Vanuatu (once the New Hebrides), independent since 1980. These creoles are very different from the English spread by missionaries. Anyway, the communities that speak this English are all very small minorities in their countries, as one would expect where the language has been spread by re-education.

英国人也从相反的方向来到太平洋岛屿。自19世纪初以来，夏威夷一直是捕鲸者的冬季停泊港，从1820年起，它成为来自新英格兰的15个传教团的关注焦点。美国商人也日益活跃，或许是在美国“昭昭天命”实现后，他们正在寻找新的疆域；他们是1848年至1850年间土地分割的主要受益者。在英国、法国和美国相互竞争的利益之间，夏威夷的独立状态曾短暂地维持了一段时间。但美国的压力丝毫没有减弱：1875年签订了互惠条约，1893年夏威夷君主制被废黜，1898年整个群岛被美国吞并。

English was also coming to the Pacific islands from the opposite direction. Since the early nineteenth century Hawaii had been a winter harbour for whalers, and from 1820 it became the focus of interest for fifteen companies of missionaries from New England. US businessmen were also increasingly active, perhaps looking for a new frontier after the fulfilment of their country’s ‘Manifest Destiny’; they were the main beneficiaries of a land division organised in 1848-50. For a short time, Hawaiian independence survived, balanced among the contending interests of Britain, France and the USA. But American pressure was unabating: a special treaty of reciprocity was struck in 1875, the Hawaiian monarchy was deposed in 1893, and in 1898 the whole archipelago was annexed to the USA.

1896年，夏威夷共和国（在君主制垮台后短暂成立）颁布的首批法令之一，便是规定英语作为教学语言，且每天至少有一半的课时；但实际上，学校完全禁止使用夏威夷语。在那一代人中，夏威夷语的传承彻底中断。一位祖母在孙女上学第一天前对她说：

In 1896 one of the first acts of the Hawaiian republic, formed briefly after the fall of the monarchy, was to require English as medium of instruction for no less than half the school day; but in practice no Hawaiian at all was allowed. In that generation, the transmission of the language from parent to child stopped dead. One grandmother told her granddaughter before her first day of school:

E pa'a pono ka 'ōlelo a ka haole。 Mai kālele i kā kākou 'ōlelo, 'a'ohe he pono i laila。 A ia ke ola o ka noho 'ana ma kēiamua aku i ka 'ike pono i ka 'ōlelo a ka po'e haole。

E pa’a pono ka ‘ōlelo a ka haole. Mai kālele i kā kākou ‘ōlelo, ‘a’ohe he pono i laila. A ia ke ola o ka noho ‘ana ma kēiamua aku i ka ‘ike pono i ka ‘ōlelo a ka po’e haole.

好好学习白人的语言。不要依赖我们的语言，它毫无价值。一个人的未来福祉取决于掌握外国民族的语言^。64

Learn well the language of the whites. Do not rely on our language, there’s no value there. One’s future well-being is dependent upon mastering the language of the foreign people.⁶⁴

这听起来像是特别严苛的再教育，但实际上夏威夷的情况至少同样符合这种“扫除式”模式：到1996年，夏威夷人口达到120万时，只有18.8%是夏威夷族裔，而其中一半人的夏威夷血统不足50%。除了尼豪岛这个小岛之外，岛上所有居民现在至少都能说英语，绝大多数人不会说其他语言。

This sounds like particularly harsh re-education, but in fact Hawaii conforms at least as well to the sweep-aside model: by 1996, with the population now standing at 1.2 million, only 18.8 per cent were ethnic Hawaiians, and half of these had less than 50 per cent Hawaiian ancestry. Outside the one small island of Niihau, everyone on the islands is now at least bilingual in English, and the vast majority know no other language.

1898年，美国在帝国主义的狂喜中，强行从西班牙手中夺取了菲律宾和关岛（参见第十章“尾声：横跨太平洋”，第377页）；一年后，美国又强行解决了长期存在的萨摩亚争端，占领了该群岛的东半部。此后四十年间，这些新领土得以平静，逐渐适应了英语；但1941年12月7日，美国偷袭了位于美属夏威夷的珍珠港，太平洋战争由此爆发。战争结束后，美国亲眼目睹了这些岛屿作为战场的残酷一面，并最终占领了密克罗尼西亚的所有日本殖民地。尽管这些殖民地在20世纪70年代之后不再是日本的殖民地，但它们都与美国保持着密切联系。英语已成为太平洋地区的通用语，但在夏威夷、澳大利亚和新西兰以外，英语在其他任何地方都不是主要语言。

In the same year of 1898, the USA took the Philippines and Guam forcibly from Spain in a flush of imperialist glee (see Chapter 10, ‘Coda: Across the Pacific’, p. 377); and a year later they also enforced their own solution to a long-standing dispute over Samoa, taking the eastern half of the archipelago. There was then a respite for forty years, as these new territories got used to the sound of English; but on 7 December 1941 an attack on Pearl Harbor, in American Hawaii, unleashed the Pacific war with Japan. At the war’s end, having got to know a decidedly unbalmy side of the islands as battlefields, the USA found itself in possession of all the Japanese colonies in Micronesia. Though no longer colonies after the 1970s, they have all kept close ties to the USA. English has become the lingua franca of the Pacific, but outside Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand it is nowhere a majority language.

奇迹接踵而至

Wonder upon wonder

与前几章一样，本章目前主要关注的是推动语言传播的政治发展。但至少在过去两个世纪里，还有其他因素在推动英语的发展，而且这种推动作用随着时间的推移愈发明显。拉姆·莫汉·罗伊在1823年呼吁人们接受英语教育时，曾说过这样一番话，从中我们可以窥见一斑：“……欧洲人所掌握的实用科学，已经发展到超越世界其他地区居民的程度……”

This chapter, like all those before it, has mainly focused so far on the political developments that have spread a language. But something else has been acting in favour of English, at least for the last two centuries, and increasingly so as decade follows decade. A glimmer of it was seen in the 1823 remark of Ram Mohan Roy, pleading for access to English education: ‘… useful sciences, which the natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world … ‘

推动英国企业——以及其语言——走向世界的，并非仅仅是自信的进取精神、强大的火力优势或无与伦比的资本。所有这些因素都发挥了作用，但它们都源于英国作为工业革命中心和源泉的卓越地位，并因此而得到强化。正如我们所见，在19世纪，当世界各地的人们都热衷于接受英语再教育时，英国显然是世界上最富有、最具活力的国家。正如一位历史学家精辟而有力的总结：

It has not only been self-assured aggression, superiority in fire-power or unrivalled access to capital which has carried British enterprise—and so, directly or indirectly, its language—around the world. All these things have played a role, but they had flowed from, and been reinforced by, the amazing status of Britain as centre and source of the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century, when, as we have seen, people all over the world avidly accepted re-education in English, Britain was evidently the richest, and the most dynamic, country in the world. To quote a historian’s pithy and overwhelming summary:

1760年至1830年间，英国贡献了欧洲约三分之二的工业产出增长（——P . Bairoch，1982），其在全球制造业产出的份额从1.9%跃升至9.5%；在接下来的三十年里，尽管新技术已传播到西方其他国家，英国的工业扩张仍将这一数字推高至19.9%……“英国人口仅占世界总人口的2%，占欧洲总人口的10%，但其现代工业产能似乎相当于世界潜在产能的40-45%，以及欧洲潜在产能的55-60%”（—— F. Crouset，1982）。 1860年，英国现代能源（煤炭、褐煤、石油）消耗量是美国或普鲁士/德国的5倍，是法国的6倍，更是俄罗斯的155倍！它一国就占世界贸易总额的五分之一，但制成品贸易额却占五分之二^。65

Between 1760 and 1830, the United Kingdom was responsible for around ‘two-thirds of Europe’s industrial growth of output’ (— P. Bairoch 1982), and its share of world manufacturing production leapt from 1.9% to 9.5%; in the next thirty years, British industrial expansion pushed that figure to 19.9%, despite the spread of the new technology to other countries in the West … ‘With 2% of the world’s population and 10% of Europe’s, the United Kingdom would seem to have had a capacity in modern industries equal to 40-45% of the world’s potential, and 55-60% of that in Europe’ (— F. Crouset 1982). Its energy consumption from modern sources (coal, lignite, oil) in 1860 was 5 times that of either the United States or Prussia/Germany, 6 times that of France, and 155 times that of Russia! It alone was responsible for one-fifth of the world’s commerce, but for two-fifths of the trade in manufactured goods.⁶⁵

即便当时尚未有完整的统计数据，但沐浴在如此惊人的现实光环之下，印度学生通常更看重英国教育方式带来的物质利益，而非新教传教士所承诺的永恒回报，也就不足为奇了。19世纪英语的声望如日中天，其过程与中世纪和近代早期法语成为欧洲文化主导语言的过程如出一辙。归根结底，人们的想法是：“既然如此富有，怎能不聪明呢？”

Bathed in the aura of such a stunning reality—even if the full statistics were not then available—it is hardly surprising that Indian students had usually been more impressed by the material benefits of British methods than the imperishable rewards promised by the Protestant missionaries. The prestige of English in the nineteenth century was elevated to the skies through the same process that had made French the leading language of European culture throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. At root, the thought was: ‘if you’re so rich, how can you not be smart?’

法国拥有肥沃的农田和充足的劳动力，这为英国的崛起奠定了良好的自然条件，而英国的初始资本却相当有限。十七世纪初，当英国人初次踏足东印度群岛，试图涉足香料贸易时，他们面临的主要问题是缺乏当地有需求的商品。但如今，经过两个多世纪的贸易、权谋、造船和战争，他们的资本和影响力使他们几乎可以随心所欲地获得任何东西：正如经济学家斯坦利·杰文斯在1865年得意洋洋地宣称的那样：

France had had a good natural endowment of fertile farmland and abundant labour on which to found this, but Britain had had quite a modest starting capital. In the early seventeenth century, when the British had first turned up in the East Indies, and tried to get involved in the spice trade, their main problem had been the lack of goods for which there was any local demand. But now, after over two centuries of trading, finagling, shipbuilding and warring, their capital and influence gave them access to pretty much anything they might desire: as the economist Stanley Jevons crowed in 1865:

北美和俄罗斯的平原是我们的玉米地；芝加哥和敖德萨是我们的粮仓；加拿大和波罗的海沿岸是我们的林木场；澳大拉西亚有我们的牧羊场，阿根廷和北美西部草原有我们的牛群；秘鲁输送白银，南非和澳大利亚的黄金流向伦敦；印度人和中国人为我们种植茶叶，我们的咖啡、糖和香料种植园遍布印度各地…… ⁶⁶

The plains of North America and Russia are our corn fields; Chicago and Odessa our granaries; Canada and the Baltic our timber-forests; Australasia contains our sheepfarms, and in Argentina and on the western prairies of North America are our herds of oxen; Peru sends her silver, and the gold of South Africa and Australia flows to London; the Hindus and the Chinese grow tea for us, and our coffee, sugar and spice plantations are in all the Indies…⁶⁶

英国作为一个强国，将会发现其他一些强国，特别是北美的一个国家，有可能会改变贸易条件，使其不利于英国；但这对于英语国家来说并非损失；如果说有什么损失的话，那就是当美国的英语居民开始将目光投向自身领域之外，并利用他们肥沃的土地、丰富的矿藏以及受过高等教育的庞大人口等资源，来实现他们自己制定的计划时，这反而是一种净收益。

Britain, as a power, was going to find that some of these other powers, especially one in North America, would have a tendency to shift the terms of trade against it; but this was no loss to the English-language community; if anything it was a net gain when the English-speaking inhabitants of America began to look beyond their own domain, and use their resources, in fertile fields, in productive mines, and in a highly educated and massive population, for schemes of their own devising.

在财富飞速增长的浪潮中，通信的效率和速度也出现了显著的飞跃。十九世纪和二十世纪见证了前所未有的进步，首先是发明了人员和货物运输系统，随后迅速在全球范围内应用。或许更令人印象深刻的是，在信息传输和存储系统方面也取得了同步的进步，这主要得益于电子技术的进步。从1830年开始的150年间，我们从第一台火车头，经由汽船，到大众航空运输；从电报，到电话，再到全球广播的广播和电视，以及早期计算机网络的雏形。在同一时期，人们找到了存储和随时访问各种声音（包括语音和音乐）、视觉场景和图像，以及实时事件和动作影像的方法。在以往的时代，任何一项技术都足以改变世界；而在这个时代，当人类对神奇力量的梦想成真时，所有这些技术汇聚到了一起。

Amid the general splurge of galloping wealth creation, there was a particular surge in the power and speed of communications. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed progress that was unheard of, first in inventing, and then in speedily applying, all over the world, systems for transport of people and merchandise. Perhaps even more impressive is the parallel progress made, largely using electronics, in systems to transmit and store all sorts of information. A hundred and fifty years from 1830 takes us from the first railway engine through the steamboat to mass-market air transport, and from telegraph through the telephone to global broadcasts of radio and television, as well as the first approaches to effective computer networks. In the same period, means were found to store, and to access at will, all kinds of sounds, including speech and music, visual scenes and pictures, and views of events and actions as they took place. Any one of these would have had the potential to transform the world in an earlier age; but in this age, when humanity’s dreams of magical powers came true, they all came together.

几乎所有这些新技术都是由讲英语的人发明的——比如斯蒂芬森、富尔顿、莱特、贝尔、贝尔德、爱迪生——或者是由其他语言的使用者发明的，但他们必须在英语世界工作，比如马可尼和路透。即便有些技术并非如此——想想奔驰的德国内燃机，或是达盖尔和卢米埃尔等先驱者开创的法国摄影和电影——也是讲英语的开发者，比如亨利·福特或好莱坞的电影制作人，率先大规模地展示了新媒体的潜力。这必然意味着，关于这些成就的关键讨论，如何复制它们以及如何利用它们，主要都是用英语进行的。对于科学家和工程师，尤其是对于商人而言，英语一直是世界知识传播的语言。自从楔形文字确立阿卡德语成为近东和中东的官方语言以来，技术在传播语言方面从未如此有效。（参见第三章“阿卡德语——世界领先的技术：识字模式”，第 58 页。）

Almost every one of these new technologies was invented by a speaker of English—Stephenson, Fulton, Wright, Bell, Baird, Edison—or by a speaker perhaps of another language who had to work in the English-speaking world, as Marconi and Reuter had. And even when they were not—think of Benz’s German internal combustion engine, or the French photograph and motion picture, due to pioneers such as Daguerre and Lumière—it was English-speaking developers, such as Henry Ford or the film-makers of Hollywood, who first demonstrated what could be done with the new media on a truly vast scale. This inevitably meant that the key talk about these achievements, how to replicate them and what was to be done with them, took place above all in English. For scientists and engineers, but crucially for businessmen, English has been the language in which the world’s know-how is set out. Never since cuneiform writing set up Akkadian as the diplomatic language of the Near and Middle East has technology been so effective in spreading a language. (See Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 58.)

这些在所谓“通讯”领域取得的成就，都倾向于减少世界距离带来的时间和精力成本。但它们也倾向于缩小远距离人群所感知到的世界差异。毫不夸张地说，它们使某些经验描述对越来越多的人来说变得“通用”。它们使区域和国际商务活动变得常规化，使国际交流能够涉及最高级别的人员，使遥远的目的地成为短暂访问甚至度假的场所。但它们也使人们记忆中的图像和短语标准化，从广告、娱乐到教育，无一例外；如今，我们不仅被教导去欣赏经典文本和艺术作品，还被教导去欣赏经典的广告歌曲、经典的广告、经典的媚俗文化，这些都萦绕在我们脑海中，无论身处国家的一端还是世界的另一端：而且我们记住的词语很可能是英语，即使我们是匈牙利人、巴厘岛人、南非人或蒙古人。

These triumphs in what is called ‘communications’ all tend to reduce the time-taking and effort-costing effects of distances in the world. But they also tend to reduce the differences between the world as it is presented to distant people. Quite literally, they make certain descriptions of experience ‘common’ to more and more people. They make regional and international business routine, allow international contacts to involve the highest level of personnel, turn far-distant destinations into sites for brief visits, even holidays. But they also standardise the images and phrases that people carry in their memories, from advertising through entertainment to education; nowadays there are not only classic texts and works of art that we are taught to appreciate, but classic jingles, classic ads, classic kitsch, which we can’t get out of our heads from one end of the country or one end of the world to another: and quite likely the words we remember will be in English, even if we are Hungarian, Balinese, South African or Mongolian.

新的通讯技术也催生了新的机构，这些机构存在的首要目的就是包装、润色和传播文字。报纸、杂志、电影制片厂、电影院、歌谱出版商和唱片公司、广播电台、电视制作公司、网站设计师：这份名单无疑在未来还会继续增加。在每一种媒介中，广告——作为语言媒体的最高元产品，如同肥料或生长激素一般，通过其明确的内容促进所有这些语言产品的分销和销售；同时，广告在渠道上支付的费用也使传播媒体能够降低价格、扩大覆盖范围；此外，广告本身也是语言素材的重要生产者。十九世纪和二十世纪的这些新机构并非都局限于英语——但它们最初都是以英语呈现的，而英语也一直是最大的生产语言。

The new technologies of communication have made possible new institutions too, institutions that exist above all to spin words, to decorate them and transmit them. Newspapers, magazines, film studios, cinemas, song-sheet publishers and recording companies, radio stations, television production companies, website designers: the list will no doubt continue long into the future. And within every medium, advertising—the supreme meta-product of the language media, acting as a kind of fertiliser or growth hormone, promoting distribution and sales of all these language-based products through its explicit content, even as its payments for space on the channels enable the communications media to cut their prices and reach farther; and at the same time, a major producer of language material in its own right. None of these new institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is restricted to English—but they all became available first in English, and English has remained the biggest producer.

正如葡萄牙人最初在印度洋贸易中崭露头角时所发现的那样，一种国家语言并非只能局限于本国国民。在葡萄牙自身的影响力早已被荷兰和英国取代之后，葡萄牙语在南亚和东南亚地区却成为了国际贸易乃至基督教教会的通用语，持续了十代甚至更久。英语也经历了同样的过程，只不过其影响范围是全球性的，而非仅限于海洋。世界各地越来越多的人发现他们需要与英语使用者打交道，以至于他们的交流开始交融：非英语母语者，甚至那些与英语世界没有任何直接联系的人，也开始为了方便而使用英语进行交流。正如一句英国谚语所说，“成功带来成功”，语言的传播也不例外。在二十世纪，英语取代法语成为国际会议的常用语言。航空交通的通用语言一直是（某种形式的）英语——这或许并不令人惊讶，毕竟航空业是美国的发明；但无论如何，英语已成为世界首选的国际通用语。据估计，1996年，85%的国际组织正式使用英语，33%的组织只使用英语。在亚太地区，90%的国际组织只使用英语。 ⁶⁷

As the Portuguese found when they first gained a reputation for trade in the Indian Ocean, a national language need not remain restricted to its own nationals. Portuguese became the lingua franca of international trade—and indeed the Christian Church—in South and South-East Asia for ten generations and more, long after Portugal itself had yielded in influence to the Dutch and British. The same thing has happened to English, but on a global, rather than an oceanic, scale. So many people in different parts of the world were finding that they needed to deal with English speakers that their dealings began to overlap: non-natives, and even those without any direct connection to the English-speaking world, started using English among themselves, purely for their own convenience. In the words of the English proverb, ‘nothing succeeds like success’, and the spread of a language is no exception. In the twentieth century English replaced French as the usual language for international conferences. The language of air traffic has always been (a restricted form of) English—unsurprising, perhaps, since aviation is a US invention; but English has anyway become the world’s interlingua of choice. For 1996 it was estimated that 85 per cent of international associations made official use of English, and 33 per cent used nothing else. In Asia and the Pacific, 90 per cent of international organisations work only in English.⁶⁷

英语世界以其敏锐的商业嗅觉，也把这转化为一项有利可图的产业：英语语言教学（ELT）不仅成为一门教育，而且——就像早期在孟加拉邦那样——发展成为一个独立的商业服务行业。如今，它几乎在世界各国蓬勃发展：如果环境语言是英语，那么对于学生来说，这无疑是一个练习英语的好地方；如果不是，那么学习英语就必然是一项非常值得追求的技能。颇具影响力的哲学家詹姆斯·密尔（1773-1836）曾说过，帝国公务员制度只不过是英国上层阶级“庞大的户外救济体系”：英语语言教学可以被视为解决同一问题的新方案，尽管如今对背景和国籍的要求比那时要低一些。

And the English-speaking world, with its characteristic eye for a business opportunity, has converted this too into a paying proposition: English Language Teaching (ELT) has become not only a field of education, but—as in those early days in Bengal—a commercial service industry in its own right. Now it flourishes in almost every country of the world: if the ambient language is English, it must be a good place for the students to get plenty of practice; and if it is not, English must be an eminently desirable skill to learn. The influential philosopher James Mill (1773-1836) had once remarked that the imperial civil service was little more than ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes’ of Great Britain: ELT could be seen as a new answer to the same problem, though now the qualifications in background and nationality are a little less demanding than they were then.

英语的传播在地理上比英国殖民地的扩张更难描绘。从本质上讲，它直接源于英国在印度推行的再教育政策。但其传播机制几乎完全是扩散，因为——与印度不同——英语在传播过程中几乎没有母语使用者。它或许是语言凭借其所关联的文化声望而传播的最佳例证。我们之前的例子已经从原则上证明了这种可能性，例如公元前14世纪埃及和赫梯的宫廷使用阿卡德语进行通信，公元5世纪柬埔寨人和爪哇人选择用梵文铭刻他们的寺庙，以及16世纪从阿富汗南下印度的莫卧儿王朝选择波斯语而非其本土突厥语作为宫廷语言。17、18世纪法语在东欧的流行也应从这个角度来看待。但英语的传播是历史上第一次有一种语言和文化同时受到世界各地人民的喜爱，这真是一件独一无二的事情。

This spread of English is harder to map geographically than the expansion of British colonies. In spirit, it follows in direct descent from the re-education policy that the British introduced in India. But the mechanism is almost pure diffusion, since—unlike in India—the language has travelled with very little presence of its native speakers. It is probably the best example of a language spread by the sheer prestige of the culture associated with it. Our previous examples have shown the possibility in principle, as when the Egyptian and Hittite courts of the fourteenth century BC corresponded in Akkadian, when the Cambodians and Javanese of the fifth century AD chose to inscribe their temples with literary Sanskrit, or when the Mughals, sweeping down into India from Afghanistan in the sixteenth century, preferred Persian to their native Turkic as their court language. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century vogue for French in eastern Europe, too, should be seen in this light. But the spread of English was the first time that a language and culture had simultaneously made themselves desirable to peoples all over the world, truly a unique event.

从某种意义上说，我们对这一过程的描述与通常的描述有所不同。这一点在于我们没有过多强调美国的作用。

In one way, our account of this process has differed from the usual one. This is in our lack of emphasis on the role of the USA.

二十世纪，尤其是二战后半叶，英语在全球范围内的普及主要归功于美国的影响，包括其遍布全球的军队和舰队、其蓬勃发展的商业企业，以及最重要的，其无处不在的电影、流行音乐、电视节目、新闻媒体和计算机软件。诚然，所有这些都意义重大，如今大众对英语文化的热情主要集中在美国的产品上。在以英语为母语的人群中，美国拥有2.31亿人口，显然是最大的单一群体，是英国6000万人口的四倍，占全球总数的2/3。68^而且可以说，从其所在地区以外流行的口音来看，现在最受欢迎的英语是通用美式英语，接近于非裔美国人白话英语；相比之下，英国目前广播界最流行的“河口英语”（Estuary English）则更具地方特色，它是伦敦地区对传统牛津剑桥“标准英音”（Received Pronunciation）的一种替代。^*

The worldwide take-up of English in the twentieth century, and particularly in its latter half after the Second World War, is mostly set down to the influence of the USA, its globally stationed armies and fleets, its outreaching commercial enterprises, and above all its ubiquitous films, pop music, TV shows, news media and computer software. Certainly, all these things have been significant, and mass enthusiasm for English-language culture is now focused on the products of the USA. Among the native speakers of English, the USA’s 231 million are clearly the largest single group, four times the size of the UK’s 60 million, and alone make up two-thirds of the global total.⁶⁸ And arguably, the preferred brand of English now—to judge from accents fashionable outside their own regions—is General American, verging to African American Vernacular English; by contrast, the UK’s current broadcast favourite of ‘Estuary English’, a London-oriented alternative to the traditional Oxbridge ‘Received Pronunciation’, is very much a local taste.^*

但本书始终关注的是语言社群的传播，即能够通过某种语言相互理解的人群。从这个意义上讲，口音的差异无关紧要，除非它们威胁到彼此的理解。从历史角度来看，英语能够跃升至全球地位，其跳板与其说是建立在山姆大叔近期的功绩之上，不如说是建立在约翰·布尔过去350年的冒险经历之上。

But our concern in this book has always been the spread of language communities, bodies of people who can understand one another through a given language. In this sense, distinctions of accent are irrelevant until they threaten mutual understanding. And looked at historically, it is quite evident that the springboard from which English made its jump to global status was built far less on the recent exploits of Uncle Sam than on the adventures over the previous 350 years of John Bull.

我们必须考虑第二语言使用者的增长，因为正是他们主导了20世纪英语使用范围的扩张：到20世纪50年代，所有以英语为第一语言的大国的人口增长速度都已放缓。关于第二语言使用者，戴维·格拉多尔1999年发表的论文《母语使用者的衰落》提供了一个较为准确的估计，或者说一个估计范围。他指出，拉丁美洲、撒哈拉以南非洲和南亚近年来第二语言使用者人数有所增长，这种增长几乎肯定会在未来50年内导致第二语言使用者人数超过母语使用者，即便现在尚未超过。

We have to consider the growth of second-language speakers, since it is they who have dominated expansion of English use in the twentieth century: by the 1950s, all sizeable countries whose first language was English had already slowed the growth in their populations. For second-language speakers, a good estimate, or range of estimates, is provided by David Graddol’s 1999 essay ‘The decline of the native speaker’. He identifies recent growth in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, growth that will almost certainly lead on to second-language speakers outnumbering native speakers within the next fifty years, if they don’t already.

在英国前殖民地，英语普及率通常在2%到5%之间，但通常估计总人数约为2亿。其他一些近期估计则认为这一比例更高，印度和巴基斯坦高达20%，孟加拉国为10%。 ⁶⁹如果这些估计正确，那么总人数应该已经达到3.95亿。相比之下，拉丁美洲和撒哈拉以南非洲的英语普及率显然在增长，但格拉多尔估计，目前这两个地区的英语普及率不超过总人口的1%（分别为7300万和4300万）。在世界上极少数因美国影响而大量使用英语的地区，菲律宾的英语普及率达到50%（3600万），利比里亚则高达85%（200万——尽管后者指的是英语克里奥尔语使用者）。总而言之，这些非英国殖民时期的英语地区总人口可能达到1.52亿。

The levels persisting in ex-British colonies range between 2 per cent and 5 per cent, but are usually estimated to amount in total to around 200 million speakers. Other recent estimates put the rate much higher, as much as 20 per cent in India and Pakistan, 10 per cent in Bangladesh.⁶⁹ If these are correct, the total should already stand at 395 million. Contrast Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, where knowledge of English is clearly growing, but where Graddol estimates current percentages as no more than 1 per cent of the population (73 million, 43 million). In the very few parts of the world with significant use of English directly due to US influence, the proportions of people knowing it are 50 per cent in the Philippines (36 million), and 85 per cent in Liberia (2 million—although this last represents speakers of English creole). All in all, these English-speaking regions of non-British origin may represent a total of 152 million.

因此，即使在英语世界的第二语言使用者群体中，源自英国的英语的增长似乎仍然比美国英语的激进影响更为显著。但这忽略了目前增长最快的第二语言英语地区——欧洲。^*欧洲英语究竟应被视为外语还是第二语言，纯粹是一个定义问题，但显而易见的是，它已成为欧盟的主要工作语言，并在北欧国家（尤其是斯堪的纳维亚半岛）的商业、工业和学术界得到广泛应用。格拉多尔对1990年至1998年欧盟“欧洲晴雨表”调查的分析表明，1980年之前，欧洲的英语水平虽然很高，但相对稳定，不足20%；之后开始上升，自1990年以来更是呈爆炸式增长。目前全球人口已超过1亿，接近欧盟人口的三分之一。^*

Already in this second-language-speaking part of the English world, then, it seems that the growth of British-origin English remains more significant than the radical effects of the US influence. But this leaves out of account what may currently be the fastest-growing area of second-language English, namely Europe.^* It is purely a matter of definition whether European English should be considered as part of the foreign-language or the second-language domain, but it is clear that it has become the major working language of the European Union, as well as being widely used in commerce, industry and academia in northern European countries, particularly Scandinavia. Graddol’s analysis of the European Union’s Eurobarometer surveys from 1990 to 1998 suggests that English competence in Europe was high, but fairly static, until 1980, at under 20 per cent; it then perked up and since 1990 has begun to take off meteorically. It now stands at over 100 million, approaching a third of the European Union’s population.^*

英语在同类语言中的地位

English among its peers

哦，但愿上天赐予我们某种力量，

让我们能像别人一样看待自己。

它能使我们免于许多错误

和愚蠢的想法。

衣着和举止上的矫揉造作会让我们

失去信仰。

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us.

It wad frae monie a blunder free us

An’ foolish notion.

What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us

An’ ev’n Devotion.

罗伯特·伯恩斯，《致虱子》，1798年

Robert Burns, ‘To a Louse’, 1798

一种语言，即便像全球众多使用英语思考和交流的人群这样庞大的群体，其语言特征的形成，与其说是取决于语音和词组，不如说是取决于代代相传过程中词语中积累的联想模式。一种语言诉说着一段历史——当然，是那些使用过这种语言的人们的历史——而这正是它在海外享有盛誉的主要原因，也是它吸引人们学习这门语言并融入其社群的原因。这也是为什么语言研究长期以来都强调该语言的文学，即“用该语言表达和思考过的最佳作品”，这些作品是^由该语言自身的传统所甄选的。然而，并非所有存在于一种语言漫长记忆中的经历都能被优秀的文字所铭记。

A language that links together a speech community, even a vast one like the global multitude who think and speak in English, is given its character not so much by its phonetics and phrasings as by the patterns of associations that have piled up on its words as they are transmitted down the generations. A language bespeaks a history—the history, of course, of those who have spoken it—and this is the main creator of its reputation abroad, as it is of its attractions to those who may want to learn the language, and so join its community. This is one reason why study of a language has long emphasised its literature, ‘the best that has been said and thought’^† using that language, as selected by its own tradition. But not all the experiences in a language’s long memory may have been hallowed by good writing.

回顾英语形成其今日特性和声誉的历史，人们的记忆往往带有选择性：十六世纪宗教改革和殖民扩张开始之前的历史似乎只留下极其微弱的痕迹。但自那时起，传播英语并被许多英语使用者奉为圭臬的冒险经历，却具有某种一致性。英语与追求财富、蓄意获取财富紧密相连，而获取财富的方式往往是史无前例且极富想象力的。这种追求有时不得不与宗教和公民意识以及爱国主义的荣耀相抗衡，但大多时候都能将它们争取到自己一方。总的来说，英语一直是个人自由的盟友，而非对手。英语首先是一种世界性的语言^。70

Looking back on the history of English as formative of its present character and reputation, memory can afford to be quite selective: the past before the sixteenth century of the Reformation and the beginnings of colonial expansion seems to have left only the very faintest of traces. But from that era on, the kinds of adventures that spread English, and which were prized most highly by many of its speakers, do have a certain consistency. English is associated with the quest to get rich, the deliberate acquisition of wealth, often by quite unprecedented and imaginative schemes. This quest has sometimes had to struggle with religious and civic conscience, and the glories of patriotism, but has largely been able to enlist them on its side. In general, it has been the ally, rather than the rival, of freedom of the individual. English has been, above all, a worldly language.⁷⁰

在日耳曼语方言传入并最终融合为盎格鲁-撒克逊语之前的时代，英语中几乎没有留下什么痕迹：或许只有“不列颠”（Britain）这个名称本身留存至今，它源自一个据推测是高卢语的词汇，用来描述古代不列颠人，即“有图案的人”（Pretanoi——威尔士语pryd，古爱尔兰语cruth，意为“形状”），因为他们有在身上彩绘的习俗。更古老的可能是“阿尔比恩”（Albion）这个名称，它在公元前300年左右的希腊语中出现，至今仍在盖尔语中用来指代苏格兰，即Alba。对于这个词，唯一可能的词源是印欧语系之前的词汇，使其与Alps以及两个名为Alba的古罗马城市同源：这是一个真正古老的词，意为“高地”。⁷¹爱尔兰英语中一些常见的表达方式，例如“I'm after finished my work”（我工作完成后）和“I saw Thomas and he sitting by the fire”（我看到托马斯坐在火炉旁），很可能源自爱尔兰语的典型习语，而这些习语实际上可以追溯到凯尔特人到来之前当地使用的语言。毕竟，类似的表达方式也分别出现在埃及语和闪米特语中。对此以及其他许多现象的一种解释是，这些地区之间存在史前贸易往来^。72

There is little left in English from the epoch before the arrival of the Germanic dialects that were destined to fuse into Anglo-Saxon: perhaps only the name Britain itself, from a presumably Gaulish term to describe the ancient Britons, ‘the figured ones’ (Pretanoi—Welsh pryd, Old Irish cruth, ‘form’), for their custom of body painting. Even older might be the name Albion, used in Greek c.300 BC, and still used in Gaelic to refer to Scotland, A lba: for this the only suggested etymology is pre-Indo-European, making it cognate with the A lps, and two ancient Roman cities called A lba: a truly ancient word for ‘highlands’.⁷¹ It is also just possible that some features seen in Irish English, such as ‘I’m after finishing my work’ and ‘I saw Thomas and he sitting by the fire’, imported from typical phraseology in Irish, are features that happen to go back to the language spoken here before the Celts even got here. Similar phraseology is after all found in Egyptian and the Semitic languages respectively, and one hypothesis to explain this, and much else, is that there was prehistoric trade among these regions.⁷²

我们可以简要回顾一下英语的第一个千年历史。英语于公元五世纪在不列颠确立地位，但其西部和北部却被凯尔特语所包围。凯尔特人无力抵挡英语的长矛进攻，但逐渐地，来自西北和东南的、致力于将凯尔特人皈依基督教的势力汇聚一堂，最终在公元664年的惠特比宗教会议上汇合，结束了这场竞争。当时，奥斯维国王裁定罗马基督教传统合法。英语对罗马基督教的传教士反应良好，其文字水平也随之提高，不仅翻译拉丁文作品，还创作了大量的诗歌和散文并著书立说。十一世纪，法语的入侵使英语的文学发展受到阻碍，但同时也受益于入侵者的军事威望，开始向不列颠和爱尔兰所有剩余的凯尔特人聚居区扩张。在法国统治下，英语的命运或许可以与阿拉姆语的早期发展相提并论。阿拉姆语最初被来自亚述的阿卡德语使用者以武力压制，但随着帝国精英面临动摇其权力结构的危机，阿卡德语逐渐取而代之（参见第三章“阿卡德语——世界领先的技术：识字模式”，第64页）。对于诺曼法语的骑士精神而言，这些颠覆性的危机体现在十四世纪反复肆虐的黑死病，尤其是在城镇和修道院；以及英格兰和威尔士与法国南部的军事分离。在新秩序下，封建关系瓦解，政治中心牢牢地集中在英吉利海峡以北，英语逐渐成为王国的统一语言。

We can briefly recapitulate English’s first millennium of existence. The language, once established in Britain in the fifth century, found itself surrounded by Celtic to the west and the north. Celts could not stand against its advance at spear-point, but gradually forces bent on converting its speakers to Christianity converged from the north-west and south-east, finally meeting and ending the competition at the Synod of Whitby in 664, when King Oswy ruled in favour of the Roman tradition. English reacted well to the sophisticated missionaries of Roman Christianity, becoming actively literate, with translations from Latin but also its own poetry and prose set down in books. Overlaid by French in the eleventh century, it suffered a setback to its literary life, but benefited from the invaders’ military prestige in that it began to expand into all the remaining Celtic areas of both Britain and Ireland. Its life under French domination could perhaps be compared to the early years of Aramaic, submerged militarily by speakers of Akkadian from Assyria, but gradually replacing it as the empire’s elite faced crises that shook its power structure (see Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 64). For the chivalrous romance of Norman French, the disrupting crises came as bubonic plague, which struck repeatedly in the fourteenth century, especially in towns and monasteries, and military severance of England and Wales from southern France. In the new dispensation, where feudal ties were dissolved and politics was firmly focused north of the Channel, English came into its own as the unifying language of the kingdom.

长达一千年的漫长时期塑造了我们今天所知的英语的实质，但其社会结构与随后的资产阶级生活截然不同，因此对英语的现代特征贡献甚微。十六世纪，英国统治者开始将国家视为一个独立于欧洲任何世俗或宗教权力之外、原则上与欧洲任何权力平等的实体。在此期间，英国也为与不列颠群岛的边远地区——苏格兰和爱尔兰——正式联合奠定了基础。整个地区的统治权牢牢掌握在伦敦手中。与此同时，随着印刷书籍的出现，英语的拼写和语法也逐渐标准化。英国和英语都为未来的发展做好了准备。

This long period, a full millennium, created the substance of English as we know it, but socially it was so different from the bourgeois life that followed that it has contributed little to the language’s modern character. In the sixteenth century England’s rulers began to conceive the country as an agency independent of, and in principle equal to, any power in Europe, secular or spiritual. In this period the foundation was also laid for the formal union with the outlying parts of the British Isles, Scotland and Ireland. The governance of the whole region was firmly in London’s hands. At the same time, with the advent of printed books, the spelling and grammar of English became standardised. England, and English, was positioned for growth.

这种增长来之不易，其基础是海上力量和商业信誉。在十七和十八世纪，英国皇家海军和伦敦城的实力变得不可撼动，二者共同促成了英语在全球的传播。作为殖民者带到北美的语言，英语得以持续发展并不断扩散：殖民地自给自足，并以牺牲邻近地区为代价而壮大。毫不奇怪，随着财富的增长，他们也变得更加自信和傲慢：他们从未真正需要反思其早期自负的态度，尤其是在他们几乎不可能忽视，无论遇到来自土著还是其他殖民强国的反对，他们总是占据上风的情况下。对“昭昭天命”的信仰几乎可以被视为经验的教训。

This growth, when it came, was based on sea power and commercial credit. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the strength of the Royal Navy and the City of London became unassailable, and both enabled English to be projected around the world. As the language that settlers brought to North America, English simply persisted and spread: the colonies were self-sufficient, and grew at the expense of their neighbours. Not surprisingly, as they became richer they also became more self-confident and overbearing: they never had serious cause to revise their early, self-regarding, attitudes, especially since they could hardly fail to notice that whenever they came up against opposition, whether indigenous or from another colonial power, they came off best. A belief in ‘manifest destiny’ could almost be seen as the lesson of experience.

在另一项传播英语的伟大海外事业——英国东印度公司（与弗吉尼亚一样，成立于十七世纪初）中，商业头脑更为突出。这项事业的驱动力并非来自绝望或充满希望的人们倾尽一生，而是来自富人投入的部分资本。但与美洲殖民地一样，参与者的冒险精神使其取得了成功。然而，在最初的两个世纪里，它并未真正开始传播英语。直到国内开始盛行一种更为严肃的精神，人们开始意识到，为牟利而获得的殖民地赋予了他们帮助弱势群体的责任，学校才开始积极建立，以传播英国文化的无形益处，首先便是语言。

In the other great overseas enterprise that spread English, the English East India Company—founded like Virginia at the beginning of the seventeenth century—business acumen was more to the fore. This enterprise was driven not by desperate or hopeful people committing their lives, but by rich people committing part of their capital. But as in the American colonies, the venturesome spirit of those engaged made it a success. Nonetheless, it did not begin seriously to spread English for the first two centuries. It was only when a more earnest spirit began to prevail at home, and the colonies taken for profit came to be seen as conferring a responsibility to uplift the less fortunate, that schools were founded actively to spread the intangible benefits of Britishness, starting with the language.

此时，第三股以英语为基础的商业浪潮开始蓬勃发展，即以化石燃料和非凡创造力为核心的工业革命，旨在从中牟利。这场革命也开启了世界一体化的进程，远方的成就更容易被人们所了解。从此，英语不仅与自负的殖民者和自以为是的统治者联系在一起，也与那些自我革新、自我膨胀的企业家联系在一起：因此，英语被视为世界各地雄心勃勃之人自我提升的通行证。

By this time a third stream of English-based enterprise was beginning to flourish, the host of ventures in ways to profit from fossil fuels and the sheer ingenuity that go under the name of the Industrial Revolution. This same revolution began the shrinking of the world, with news ever more available of achievements far away. English was from now on identified not only with self-regarding settlers and self-righteous governors but self-inventing and self-aggrandising entrepreneurs too: and so it became seen as a passport to self-improvement for ambitious people all over the world.

英语的这种发展进程在许多方面与其他世界语言的发展历程形成了鲜明对比。

This progress of English contrasts in many ways with the careers of other world languages.

与同时代的欧洲帝国语言相比，英语的传播显得格外随意。除了国家授予东印度公司贸易垄断权的第一份特许状之外，直到19世纪英国议会开始关注政策制定之前，英语的传播都带有浓厚的“自助”色彩。在加勒比海盗的辉煌时期结束后，皇家海军的维护成为了国家的责任；但将英国殖民地、英国商业乃至英国国教传播到世界各地，则完全依赖于私人力量。

Compared with its contemporaries, the fellow European imperial languages, the advance of English is remarkably informal. With the exception of the state’s first charter of a trading monopoly for the East India Company, and until the British parliament began to concern itself with policy in the nineteenth century, there is a sense of do-it-yourself. Maintenance of the Royal Navy became a state responsibility, after the glory days of profitable Caribbean piracy were over; but the actual activity of spreading English settlement, British business and indeed the Anglican word of God around the world was left up to private initiative.

这与西班牙和葡萄牙的运作模式截然不同。在西班牙和葡萄牙，个别征服者或许开辟了道路，但总督以及整个国家和教会机构的介入紧随其后；直到19世纪革命之前，西班牙和葡萄牙的所有殖民地都由欧洲直接派遣的总督统治。这导致宗主国政府与成功在海外定居的克里奥尔人之间关系紧张，缺乏团结。这些讲罗曼语的定居者并不被真正信任，他们并不被视为天主教君主的代表。在早期，土地通过委托监护制分配，这意味着他们充其量只是国王的租约持有者；正如我们所见，许多定居者在秘鲁的后裔采用克丘亚语，以强调他们与欧洲统治阶层的分离。（参见第 10 章“教会的解决方案：通用语言”，第 364 页。）在这种情况下，很难说西班牙语和葡萄牙语在海外代表了什么：或许最重要的是，它代表了与天主教会的持续联系——具有讽刺意味的是，当我们想起宗教团体的政策是如何阻碍这些语言在拉丁美洲传播数百年之久的。

This contrasts starkly with the mode of operation of Spain and Portugal, where individual conquistadores might open the way, but state involvement of viceroys, and the whole apparatus of state and Church, immediately followed; until the revolutions of the nineteenth century, all Spain’s and Portugal’s colonies were ruled by governors sent out directly from Europe. This made for strained relations, and a lack of solidarity, between the home governments and the criollos who had succeeded in establishing themselves abroad. The Romance-speaking settlers were not really trusted as representatives of their Catholic Majesties. In the early days, the allocation of land through encomienda meant that they were at best leaseholders from the king; and as we have seen, many settlers’ descendants in Peru adopted Quechua to emphasise their separateness from the European establishment. (See Chapter 10, ‘The Church’s solution: The lenguas generales’, p. 364.) In these circumstances, it is hard to say what the Spanish and Portuguese languages came to represent overseas: perhaps more than anything else, the continuing link with the Catholic Church—ironic, when we remember how the policies of the religious orders had delayed the spread of these languages in Latin America for hundreds of years.

对法国而言，海外扩张也始终处于政府的控制之下，自1534年弗朗索瓦一世国王派遣雅克·卡蒂埃寻找西北航道以来，便一直如此。十七世纪，科尔伯特曾为法语未能广泛传播而忧心忡忡；但一个世纪后，法国殖民者对德拉萨尔沿密西西比河的探险几乎漠不关心，更遑论有效占领这些地区，以至于拿破仑主动提出将这些地区在未亲眼目睹的情况下卖给美国。十九世纪，法国从阿尔及利亚到印度支那所获得的殖民地，都是法国武力夺取，为了法国的荣耀：荣耀始终是法国扩张的动力。与此同时，法国显然仍然是其所倡导的科学文明的重要力量，因此，使用法语可以被视为通往现代化的途径。殖民者确实迁入了阿尔及利亚，但在其他地方，真正使法国殖民地成为现实并传播法语的力量，是中央政府。除了阿尔及利亚和印度支那之外，这种中央集权式的管理方式意味着，20世纪60年代法国撤出控制时，过程出人意料地迅速且顺利。留下的往往是对法语的喜爱，法语是法兰西文明的象征，既理性又充满民族情怀。

And for France, too, overseas expansion was under government control, ever since King François I had sent Jacques Cartier out to seek a North-West Passage in 1534. In the seventeenth century, Colbert had fretted over the non-expansion of the French language; but a century later, the French colonists on the ground had taken so little interest in de la Salle’s explorations along the Mississippi, let alone effective occupation of them, that Napoleon volunteered to sell them, sight unseen, to the USA. All the colonies that the French acquired in the nineteenth century, from Algeria to Indochina, were taken by French arms for the glory of France: la gloire remained an active motive. At the same time France was clearly still a major force in the scientific civilisation that it promoted, so that use of French could be presented as a channel to modernity. Settlers did move into Algeria, but elsewhere the force that made the French colonies a reality—and so spread the use of French—was the central government. Apart from in Algeria and lndo-China, this centralised approach meant that withdrawal of French control, when it came in the 1960s, was surprisingly speedy and painless. What often remained was an affection for the French language, a symbol of la civilisation française, rational in aspiration, national in sentiment.

鉴于俄语在三个世纪里几乎是赤裸裸地作为沙皇帝国权力的象征而传播开来——对那些不被接纳为俄罗斯人的人来说，它的吸引力有限——而且20世纪试图将其事后改造为“科学社会主义”通用语的努力也随着1991年苏联的解体而失败，俄语在某种程度上存在着形象问题。其强硬的唯物主义倾向与法国理性主义的轻盈、英国实用主义的客观以及美国消费主义的开放形成了鲜明对比。俄语与集体努力和经济紧缩的联系几乎与英语所象征的个人主动性和创造力以及通过创业致富的理念截然相反。

Given that Russian was spread over three centuries rather nakedly as a mark of the power of the Tsar’s empire—of limited appeal to those not accepted as Russian—and that the twentieth-century attempt to convert it, after the fact, into a vernacular for ‘Scientific Socialism’ collapsed with the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian language has something of an image problem. The heavy-handedness with which its materialism was asserted contrasted with the lighter touch of French rationalism, and the even-handedness of British pragmatism, and the open-handedness of American consumerism. Russian’s associations with group effort and economic austerity are almost the converse of English’s conjuring up of initiative and ingenuity by individuals, leading to wealth through enterprise.

英语作为一种典型的“世俗”语言，也可以与更遥远过去的世界语言的氛围进行对比。古代的汉语、埃及语，乃至希腊语和拉丁语，都承载着重视当下价值的文明，并在鼎盛时期为公民提供高水平的生活，以及一定程度的和平与安全。相比之下，阿拉伯语和梵语，如同基督教时代的拉丁语和希腊语，则由更加超脱尘世的文化所推广，这些文化将使用者的追求聚焦于精神目标，并将日常生活中可见的成功或满足视为真正重要事物的一小部分^。

English, as a quintessentially ‘worldly’ tongue, can also be set against the atmospheres of world languages from a more distant past. Chinese and Egyptian, and indeed Greek and Latin in the ancient world, were all vehicles of civilisations that emphasised the value of the here and now, and at their best were able to provide a high standard of living to their citizens, as well as a degree of peace and security. Arabic and Sanskrit, by contrast, like Latin and Greek in the Christian era, were and are promoted by much more otherworldly cultures, focusing their speakers’ aspirations on spiritual aims, and seeing their degree of visible success or gratification in daily life as only a small part of what is really important.^*

当今时代，语言文化差异显而易见。21世纪初，学习英语或阿拉伯语已成为世界各地许多年轻人的共同愿望。在西亚和北非国家，阿拉伯语教学已发展成为一项服务行业，专门面向外国客户，正如世界其他许多地区的英语教学一样。英语和阿拉伯语在某些方面惊人地相似：两者都拥有约一千五百年的书面历史，都由那些往往不懂其他语言的人传播到世界各地，并且都拥有丰富的文学作品，承载着几个世纪以来的历史文化内涵。然而，很少有年轻人会为了研读阿维森纳的哲学、《一千零一夜》的故事或纳吉布·马哈福兹的小说而努力学习阿拉伯语；更少有人会为了阅读《钦定版圣经》或《公祷书》而苦苦钻研英语。在当今时代，对于外国学习者而言，阿拉伯语是《古兰经》的语言，而英语则是现代商业和全球流行文化的语言。

This difference of language culture is in our age very evident. In the early twenty-first century, the aspiration to learn English or Arabic has become distinctive for many young people all over the world. In the countries of western Asia and North Africa, Arabic Language Teaching has become a service industry seeking foreign customers, just like ELT in so many other parts of the world. English and Arabic are in some ways remarkably similar: both have a written history of about one and a half thousand years, have been spread around the world by speakers who often knew no other language, and have bodies of literature that freight them with associations many centuries old. But rare is the young person who strives to learn Arabic for Avicenna’s philosophy, the stories of the Thousand and One Nights or the novels of Naguib Mahfouz; even rarer is one who struggles with English hoping to read the King James Bible, or the Book of Common Prayer. In our age, Arabic is for foreign learners the language of the Koran, English the language of modern business and global popular culture.

^*古英语中的祝酒词包括“祝你快乐”、“保持健康”、“让它来”（即传递爱的酒杯）、“痛饮”、“倒着喝”、“为我干杯”、“喝一半”、“一饮而尽”。这些都是英国人在黑斯廷斯战役前夜狂欢时常听到的祝酒词和豪言壮语。蒙茅斯的杰弗里在约1140年写道：“……直到今天，英国仍然保留着这样的传统：在宴会上，向他人敬酒的人说‘waesseil’，而接过酒杯的人则回答‘drincheil’”（《不列颠诸王史》第100节，手稿568，第46v页）。

^* Old English ‘Be happy’; ‘stay healthy’; ‘let it come’ (i.e. the loving-cup passed around); ‘drink lustily’ ‘drink backwards’; ‘drink to me’ ‘drink half; ‘drink to the dregs’. These are all English toasts and drinking boasts to be heard as the English caroused the night away before the crucial battle of Hastings. Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing c.1140, says “… to this day the tradition has endured in Britain that at a banquet the one who drinks to another says “waesseil”, and he who receives the cup after him replies “drincheil’” (Historia Regum Britannie § 100, ms 568, f. 46v.).

^*拉丁语祈祷文标题为“主的灵”、“人民的救赎”、“圣母颂”，源自法语中“怜悯”、“（希腊语）主，怜悯我们”、“我们的天父”的自然化形式。

^* Latin titles of prayers, ‘Spirit of the Lord’, ‘Salvation of the people’, ‘Hail Holy Mother’, following naturalised French forms of ‘Take pity’, (Greek) ‘Lord, have mercy’, ‘Our Father’.

^†罗伯特·韦斯（Robert Wace）是一位来自泽西岛的诺曼人，12世纪60年代受亨利二世国王委托，撰写了一部颂扬诺曼历史的著作，以其始祖罗洛（Rollo，即鲁）的名字命名。这部著作与他早期的《布鲁图斯传奇》（Roman de Brut ）遥相呼应，后者讲述了诺曼人到来之前的英国（同样据称由布鲁图斯建立）。本章节讲述了1066年黑斯廷斯战役前夜英格兰人和诺曼人的不同举止；同时也巧妙地展现了英语、诺曼法语和拉丁语在诺曼英格兰的不同角色。

^† Robert Wace, a Norman from Jersey, was commissioned in the 1160s by King Henry II to write a celebration of Norman history, named for its patriarch Rollo (i.e. Rou). This was to parallel his earlier Roman de Brut, on Britain before the Normans (likewise supposedly founded by Brutus). This section tells of the different demeanours of the English and Normans on the night before Hastings, 1066; but it also neatly illustrates the different roles of English, Norman French and Latin in Norman England.

^*本节中，“诺曼人”指的是1066年至1399年间统治英格兰及其附属地的统治阶级。他们最初的官方语言是诺曼法语，也称盎格鲁-诺曼语；但1154年之后，宫廷中使用的法语方言更加多元化，因为亨利二世及其男爵们居住在法国西南部的安茹地区。此后，该王朝被称为安茹王朝。

^* In this section, ‘Norman’ will include the governing classes of England and its dependencies from 1066 to 1399. Their vernacular was initially Norman French, also known as Anglo-Norman; but after 1154, the varieties of French spoken at court would have been more broadly based, since Henry II and his barons were based in Anjou, in south-western France. Thereafter the dynasty is known as Angevin.

^这些对他们的文学文化和政治都产生了深远的影响。虽然亚瑟王的故事源于凯尔特传说，但正是盎格鲁-诺曼文学塑造了英勇骑士的形象，即身披闪亮盔甲的骑士（ chevaler），这个词最初的意思是“骑兵”。在古英语中， knight（通常拼写为cniht）仅仅是指“小伙子”，因此指的是年轻到足以战斗的人，并不带有骑兵的意味，更不用说骑士精神了。

^* These were an asset to their literary culture as much as to their politics. Although Arthur comes out of Celtic legend, it was Anglo-Norman literature which created the ideal of the gallant knight in shining armour, the chevaler, a word that originally meant ‘horseman’. In Old English knight (usually spelt cniht) had just meant ‘lad’, hence someone young enough to fight, without overtones of cavalry, let alone chivalry.

^*在上述第一次提议之后，据说爱德华于1301年曾提出要送给威尔士一位“生于威尔士，且不会说英语”的王子——随后又将自己刚出生不久、在卡那封战役总部出生的儿子献给了威尔士。然而，这个故事最早只能追溯到16世纪，而且如果爱德华本人说的是英语而非法语，这个故事会更可信一些。此外，他的儿子出生于1284年。

^* After the first of these, Edward, in 1301, is supposed to have offered to give the Welsh a prince ‘born in Wales, and without a word of English’—then presented his own son, just recently bom at campaign headquarters in Caernarfon. The story, however, goes back only to the sixteenth century, and would be more credible if Edward himself had been a speaker of English rather than French. And his son had been born in 1284.

† Calum Ceann Mór，意为“大头”，统治时期为 1059 年至 1093 年。他就是著名的马尔科姆，曾废黜并杀死了麦克白。

† Calum Ceann Mór, ‘Big Head’, who reigned from 1059 to 1093. This was the famed Malcolm who had deposed and killed Macbeth.

^*这一切都让人想起二十世纪中期英国文法学校里为学习拉丁语本身辩护时所表现出的那种充满情感、怀旧和略带绝望的语气。

^* It is all very reminiscent of the emotional, nostalgic and somewhat desperate tone of the defence for learning Latin itself, offered in the grammar schools of England in the middle of the twentieth century.

^*法律一贯保守，坚持的时间最长：直到 1733 年议会通过一项法案，法律法语才最终从英国法庭消失。按照同样的追溯标准来看，法律界对十八世纪假发和长袍的偏爱还能持续一个世纪。

^* Characteristically conservative, the law held out longest: Law French did not finally disappear from the English courts until eliminated by an act of Parliament in 1733. By the same standard of retrospection, the law’s fondness for eighteenth-century wigs and gowns has still a century to run.

† “……在许多乡村地区，语言能力受损；有些人发出奇怪的咿呀学语、叽叽喳喳声、咆哮声、低吼声和咬牙切齿声。”

† ‘… in many the country language is impaired; some use a strange babbling, twittering, snarling, growling and gnashing.’

^从另一个角度来看，英语方言对于像乔叟这样的自然主义作家来说是一大助力，他是第一个运用方言来增强对话真实感的作家。在《坎特伯雷故事集》中，里夫（他本人被设定为诺福克人）讲述了剑桥学生约翰和阿莱恩的故事，这两个人显然是北方人。而传唤官和修士也时不时地冒出一口浓重的北方英语（Robinson 1957: 686, 688, 704-5）。

^* From another point of view, the dialects of English were a boon to a naturalistic author like Chaucer, who was the first to use them to give realism to dialogue. In The Canterbury Tales, the Reeve, himself scripted as a Norfolk man, tells a story of Cambridge students John and Aleyn, who are clearly lads from the North. And the Summoner and the Friar both keep breaking into broad Northern English (Robinson 1957: 686, 688, 704-5).

^{该地区的基本}语言特征包括：在woe、stone、go等词中使用ō而非ā——亨伯河以北地区保留了古英语ā；在hill、sin、fire、mice等词中使用y（即ü，法语u），后来又使用i——肯特郡和东盎格利亚地区则使用ē——这解释了卡克斯顿拼写中大多数看似多余的y；使用情态动词shall，而非诺森伯兰郡的sal；使用代词she、they、them、theyr，而非英格兰西部和南部地区的heo、hy、hem、here。动词方面，现在分词和动名词在南部和中部地区通用为-ynge，而非北部地区的-ande ；复数形式以-en结尾或不以-en结尾： we speken，they use，而非南部地区的we speketh，hy useth。事实上，动词现在时变得非常混乱，因为在南方， -eth结尾也被用作第三人称单数结尾，莎士比亚和《詹姆斯国王钦定版圣经》中也广泛使用：风吹着，他走了。最终，这个结尾也被 -es 结尾取代了，在北方， -es结尾用于除第一人称单数以外的所有人称：我在这里，但你/他/我们/你们/他们在这里。（这些细节来自 Mossé 1962 年的著作，他提供了更多例子。）

^* The basic linguistic features of this area were: using ō not ā in words like woe, stone, go—north of the Humber they kept the Old English ā; using y (i.e. ü, French u) and later i, in words like hill, sin, fire, mice—in Kent and East Anglia they said ē—and this explains most instances of the apparently gratuitous y in Caxton’s spelling; using the modal verb shall, as against Northumbrian sal; using pronouns, she, they, them, theyr, as against West and South Country heo, hy, hem, here. In verbs, the present participle and gerund generalised Southern and Midland -ynge, as against Northern -ande; the plural ends in -en or nothing: we speken, they use, as against the South Country we speketh, hy useth. In fact, the present tense of verbs became subject to a lot of confusion, since this -eth ending was also used as a third singular ending in the South, and is widely used as such in Shakespeare and the King James Bible: the wind bloweth, he goeth. Ultimately, this too was replaced, but by the -es ending, which had been used for every person but first singular in the North: I here, but thou/ he/ we/ ye/ they heres. (These details are gathered from Mossé 1962, who gives many more.)

^*确实是威尔士语：伊丽莎白一世还授权出版了《Y Beibl Cyssegr-lan》，该书于 1588 年在伦敦印刷，并在威尔士教堂加入了《祈祷书》的威尔士语翻译 ( Y Llyfr Gweddi Gyffredin )。

^* And indeed in Welsh: Elizabeth I also authorised the publication of Y Beibl Cyssegr-lan, which was printed in London in 1588, and joined the Welsh translation of the Prayer Book (Y Llyfr Gweddi Gyffredin) in Welsh churches.

†威廉·莎士比亚的诗歌通常与《钦定版圣经》相提并论，并在英语文本定义中享有几乎同等的地位。两者几乎是同时代人，这本“钦定版”圣经编纂于1604年至1611年，而莎士比亚的创作时期则为1590年至1611年。但与圣经不同的是，莎士比亚（其作品于1623年首次完整出版）并没有立即成为英语语言的标志性文本，他的声誉在17世纪逐渐增长，直到18世纪才被塞缪尔·约翰逊正式确立为经典。

莎士比亚现象让人联想到荷马在希腊文学史上的地位。他们都是博学多才、才华横溢的诗人，但身份却鲜为人知，却都处于或接近英语文学经典主要传统的奠基阶段。他们似乎都是在实际生活和创作至少一个世纪之后才获得如此地位的。他们都对各自语言的传承做出了举足轻重的贡献，受到评论家和教师的无尽赞誉，也影响了语言社群对历史的传统认知。或许最好的解释是，他们都比大多数人更深受古老传统的影响：荷马深受游吟诗人（aoidós）的影响，莎士比亚则深受街头艺人的影响。对于同时代的人来说，这或许并不那么引人注目，因为他们是在特定的历史背景下看待这些作品的。然而，随着时间的推移，他们的作品逐渐被视为对传统的总结，并在人们的记忆中取代了传统本身。

† A corpus of texts that is usually mentioned in the same breath as the King James Bible, and accorded almost equal status in the textual definition of English, is the poetry of William Shakespeare. The two are almost exact contemporaries, this ‘Authorised Version’ of the Bible being compiled from 1604 to 1611, and Shakespeare writing from 1590 to 1611. But unlike the Bible, Shakespeare (first fully published in 1623) did not immediately become an iconic text of the English language, his reputation growing through the seventeenth century until it was fully canonised by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth.

The Shakespeare phenomenon recalls the place of Homer in the history of Greek. Each was a poet of encyclopedic range and unchallenged quality but obscure identity, at or near the very foundation of the language’s main tradition of literary classics. Each seems to have acquired this status at least a century after he actually lived and composed. Each went on to have an overwhelming role in the heritage of his language, endlessly praised by critics and schoolteachers, and also to inform traditional ideas of the language community’s history. Perhaps this is best explained by emphasising that each of them is indebted more than most to a rich ancient tradition, Homer to that of the travelling bard or aoidós, Shakespeare to that of the strolling player. This was less remarkable to their contemporaries, who saw them in context, but somehow, as time went on, their works were felt to sum up the tradition, and so replaced it in memory.

^*许多所谓对英语本质的评论，尤其是作家们的言论，实际上都是对英语使用者传统和抱负的隐晦赞美。例如，亚瑟·奎勒-库奇爵士在《牛津英语诗歌集》的序言中写道： “几个世纪以来，我们的先辈们为这片土地、殖民地和广袤的附属地创造了一种语言，它像阿提卡语一样灵活多变，像拉丁语一样庄重，充满阳刚之气，却又摆脱了日耳曼语的喉音，既能像法语一样精准，又能像意大利语一样悦耳动听，像西班牙语一样浑厚有力，并将所有这些优点融会贯通。”再比如沃尔特·惠特曼：“从自由的角度来看，英语是各种方言、种族和不同时代语言的积累和发展，也是对所有这些语言的甄选和融合。从这个角度来看，它代表了最广义的语言，也是真正意义上最伟大的研究对象。”（《美国俚语》，《北美评论》，41，1885）。这种自信当然有助于流畅地运用语言。任何语言都承载着与过去相关的庞大联想网络，而随着人们对过去的记忆不断加深，这些联想的力量也日益增强。

^* Too many remarks proffered as comments on the nature of English, especially by writers, are thinly disguised praise of the traditions and aspirations of its speakers. Consider Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s words introducing the Oxford Book of English Verse: ‘Our fathers have, in the process of centuries, provided this realm, its colonies and wide dependencies, with a speech as malleable and pliant as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic guttural, capable of being as precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as Spanish, and captaining all these excellences to its service.’ Or Walt Whitman: ‘Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race and range of time, and is the culling and composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for Language in the largest sense, and is really the greatest of studies’ (’Slang in America’, North American Review, 41, 1885). Such confidence may of course be useful in using the language eloquently. Any language carries a vast network of associations with the past, which grow in power as that past is remembered.

^*我应该向阅读此文的语言学家们保证，我有意忽略了大量借自拉丁语、法语和希腊语或由拉丁语、法语和希腊语构成的词汇中潜在的结构。

^* I should reassure linguists reading this that I am consciously ignoring the structure latent in the vast amount of vocabulary borrowed from, or constructed out of, Latin, French and Greek.

^据我所知，只有日本的“汉文”传统，即在文中文本上做标记，以便像读日语一样朗读，才有胆量摒弃这一基本惯例。

^* To my knowledge, only the Japanese ’kanbun’ tradition of marking up classical Chinese text to be read out just as if it were in Japanese has had the chutzpah to dispense with that basic convention.

^它和它神秘迁徙到的克罗阿坦岛，实际上都位于如今北卡罗来纳州的海岸。少数幸存者与当地的阿尔冈昆语使用者融合，并在十七世纪放弃了英语。但英语在后来的詹姆斯敦殖民地得以保留，该殖民地的首府后来迁至威廉斯堡。

^* It, and the island of Croatoan, to which it famously but mysteriously decamped, were actually on the coast of modern North Carolina. The few survivors, merging with local Algonquian speakers, were to drop their English in the seventeenth century. But English did survive in the follow-up colony at Jamestown, whose capital was later moved to Williamsburg.

^*值得注意的是，罗马和俄罗斯的一个主要动机——通过征服邻国来巩固边界——在很大程度上并不存在。

^* It is interesting to note that one major motive for Rome and Russia, the drive to secure borders by conquering neighbours, was largely absent.

^*该术语虽已过时，但其概念却并非如此。哈克卢伊特将这份名为《西方殖民论》的文件组织得井井有条，所有引人注目的内容都集中在第二页，章节标题也概括了全貌：这

是一篇关于近期西方探索给英格兰王国带来的巨大需求和诸多滑稽之处的论述，由牛津的理查德·哈克卢伊特应尊敬的沃尔特·拉格利（现为骑士）先生的请求和指示，于1584年在其两艘船屋前撰写。该文分为二十一章，各章标题见下页。

^* The term is an anachronism, but the concept is not. Hakluyt organises the document, Discourse of Western Planting, with all the striking content on the second page, chapter headings that tell it all:

A particuler discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifolde comodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne discoveries lately attempted, Written In the yere 1584 by Richarde Hackluyt of Oxforde at the requeste and direction of the righte worshipfull Mr. Walter Raghly [Ralegh] nowe Knight, before the comynge home of his Twoo Barkes: and is devided into xxi chapiters, the Titles whereof followe in the nexte leafe.

^*切萨皮克湾是弗吉尼亚殖民地的所在地，实际上曾是西班牙耶稣会在“佛罗里达”（la Flórida）活动的北部边界。从1565年起，这一活动范围包括了如今佐治亚州、卡罗来纳州和弗吉尼亚州的一些小型定居点，但在1572年八名传教士在切萨皮克湾遇害后，整个地区都被放弃了。

^* Chesapeake Bay, the site of the Virginia colony, had in fact been the northern boundary of Spanish Jesuit activities in ‘la Flórida’. From 1565 this had included small settlements in the modern Georgia, Carolinas and Virginia, but the whole area was abandoned in 1572 after eight missionaries were killed at Chesapeake.

†波卡洪塔斯在许多方面都是一位杰出的女性。七年前，她还是个少女时，就曾与父亲联手救了另一位英国先驱者约翰·史密斯船长的性命，而史密斯船长后来成为了詹姆斯敦殖民地的第一任总督。当约翰·罗尔夫赢得她的芳心时，她仍被囚禁在波托马克河上的一艘英国船上。她后来成为早期皈依基督教新教的信徒。

† Pocahontas was in many ways an exceptional woman. Seven years earlier, when still a girl, she had intervened with her father to save the life of another English pioneer, Captain John Smith, who went on to become the Jamestown colony’s first governor. When John Rolfe won her hand, she had still been confined against her will on an English ship on the Potomac river. She later became an early convert to Protestant Christianity.

^*巧合的是，法国人在 1541 年探索渥太华河谷时，就已经研究过阿尔冈昆语了。

^* The French had, as it happened, already studied the Algonquin language, when exploring the Ottawa river valley in 1541.

^*瑞典人在大西洋沿岸的存在时间相当短暂（1638-55 年）；他们在特拉华州的定居点被荷兰人迅速驱逐。

^* Swedish presence on the Atlantic seaboard was of fairly short duration (1638-55); their settlement in Delaware had been summarily evicted by the Dutch.

^* 1867年，阿拉斯加也被美国从俄罗斯手中购得。

^* In 1867, Alaska too was acquired, by purchase from Russia.

^*这演变成了一个传说，说德语一度几乎被宣布为美国的官方语言。

在19世纪和20世纪，德语一直是移民的第二大语言（占25%）。19世纪初，讲德语的移民数量激增，他们早期倾向于聚集在宾夕法尼亚州。这一趋势在19世纪70年代达到顶峰，据说当时宾夕法尼亚州400万人口中，有60万人以德语（“宾夕法尼亚德语”）为日常用语，另有15万人居住在州外。第一次世界大战严重破坏了德语在公共场合的普及使用。如今，德语仅在一些小型教派社区中仍然存在，例如门诺派和阿米什派（Adams 1990：第7章）。

^* This has been transmuted into the legend that at one point German was almost to be declared the official language of the USA.

German remained the second-largest language of immigrants (at 25 per cent) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There was a surge of German-speaking immigrants in the early nineteenth century, and a tendency early on for them to congregate in Pennsylvania. It peaked in the 1870s, when 600,000, among a state population of 4 million, are said to have had German (’Pennsylvania Dutch’) as their everyday language, with another 150,000 outside the state. The popular use of German in public was very severely damaged by the First World War. It survives today only in small sectarian communities such as the Mennonites and Amish (Adams 1990: ch. 7).

^†其中，英国占 14%，爱尔兰占 13%，加拿大占 12%，菲律宾占 4%，牙买加占 1%。德语占 25%，其次是俄语（10%）、匈牙利语（4%）和汉语（3%）（美国司法部，1998 年统计年鉴，引自 Wright 2000：291）。

^† This is made up of 14 per cent from the UK, 13 per cent from Ireland, 12 per cent from Canada, 4 per cent from the Philippines and 1 per cent from Jamaica. After German with 25 per cent, the next languages are Russian (10 per cent), Hungarian (4 per cent) and Chinese (3 per cent) (US Dept of Justice, 1998 Statistical Yearbook, quoted in Wright 2000: 291).

^*纽约的“鲍厄里”街是为了纪念最后一任荷兰总督彼得·斯图伊弗桑特的农场而命名的。

^* New York’s ‘Bowery’ perpetuates the name of the farm of Pieter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor.

^*超过 120 万英国人对 5.5 万法国人。

^* Over 1.2 million Britons for 55,000 French.

^*亚利桑那州、加利福尼亚州、科罗拉多州、佛罗里达州、内华达州、新墨西哥州、德克萨斯州、犹他州、怀俄明州。

^* Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Wyoming.

^*有趣的是，围绕着它们发展起来的城市，后来成为英属印度的第一个政府中心，都在 20 世纪 90 年代被重新命名：钦奈、孟买和加尔各答。

^* By interesting coincidence, the cities that grew up around them, which went on to become the first centres of government for British India, have all been renamed in the 1990s: as Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata.

†古吉拉特语vāniyān，'商人'，印地语dubhā⋅iya，'双语的'（Yule 和 Burnell 1986 [1903]，s.vv.）。

† Gujarati vāniyān, ‘merchants’, Hindi dubhā⋅iya, ‘bilingual’ (Yule and Burnell 1986 [1903], s.vv.).

§莫卧儿王朝在十六世纪将波斯语引入印度，作为其文化语言，尽管他们的普通士兵（西帕希，即“西帕伊”）讲突厥语。这与诺曼征服英格兰有着某种奇特的相似之处：波斯语扮演了法语的角色，而德里的方言在波斯语的影响下发展成乌尔都语，扮演了英语的角色。从这个意义上讲，乌尔都语，字面意思是“营地语言”，是莫卧儿王朝在印度独创的语言。而正是这种语言，而非英语，最终成为了英属印度军队的主要语言。（参见第五章“梵语不再孤立”，第222页。）

§ The Mughals had brought Persian to India in the sixteenth century as their language of culture, although their ordinary sipāhi (’sepoy’) spoke Turkic. There is something strangely analogous to the Norman conquest of England here, with Persian in the role of French, and Delhi’s vernacular, developing into ’Urdū’ under Persian influence, in the role of English. In this sense Urdu, literally ‘language of the camp’, was the distinctive linguistic creation of the Mughals in India. And it was this, not English, which was to become the major language of the British Indian Army. (See Chapter 5, ‘Sanskrit no longer alone’, p. 222.)

¶阿拉伯语“教育家，作曲家”（Yule 和 Burnell 1986 [1903]，sv）。

¶ Arabic ‘educator, composer’ (Yule and Burnell 1986 [1903], s.v.).

^*将此与传教士在西班牙语传播中所扮演的角色进行比较，便可发现另一个讽刺之处。正如第十章（“教会的解决方案：通用语”，第364页）所述，西班牙传教士阻碍了西班牙语的传播，而国家却倾向于鼓励其传播。在巴西，也发生了类似的情况（参见第十一章“葡萄牙先驱”，第392页）。但在英属印度，教会和国家——或者说国家垄断——的影响却恰恰相反。

^* Comparing this with the role of missions in the spread of Spanish points up another irony. For as noted in Chapter 10 (“The Church’s solution: The lenguas generales’, p. 364), the Spanish missions had served to retard the spread of Spanish, while the state was inclined to encourage it. In Brazil, something similar had occurred (see Chapter 11, ‘Portuguese pioneers’, p. 392). But in British India, the effects of Church and state—or state monopoly—were the reverse of this.

^*正是在这一时期，英国对印度历史的学术研究取得了巨大进展：1835 年至 1837 年间，造币厂的鉴定师兼

孟加拉亚洲学会秘书詹姆斯·普林塞普成功破译了公元前 3 世纪阿育王铭文的婆罗米文，从而揭开了孔雀王朝的核心故事。（参见第五章“梵语的特性”，第188页。）詹姆斯的兄弟亨利·托比当时是政府首席秘书，他曾公开强烈反对麦考利的备忘录，甚至可能泄露了该备忘录，从而为八千名穆斯林和另一名印度教徒的请愿提供了依据。詹姆斯在《亚洲学会会刊》的一篇社论中谴责了这一“在全印度面前，政府对本国博学之士的冷漠态度，以及对本国文学的谴责和抛弃”的举措（Allen 2002: 166-7）。

^* This was the very period when British academic studies of India’s history were making giant strides: between 1835 and 1837 James Prinsep, Assay Master at the mint, and secretary of the Asiatic

Society of Bengal, succeeded in deciphering the Brahmi writing of the emperor Aśoka’s third-century BC inscriptions, and so unlocked the central story of the Maurya dynasty. (See Chapter 5, “The character of Sanskrit’, p. 188.) James’s brother Henry Thoby, then Chief Secretary to the government, had spoken out eloquently against Macaulay’s minute, possibly even leaking it and so providing the basis for a petition from eight thousand Muslims and another from Hindus. James, in an editorial in the Asiatic Society’s Journal, condemned ‘a measure which has in the face of all India withdrawn the countenance of the Government from the learned natives of the country, and pronounced a verdict of condemnation and abandonment on its literature’ (Allen 2002: 166-7).

^*座右铭：“一天一个姑娘和十万卢比”（Dalrymple 2002: 33）。

^* Motto: ‘A lass and a lakh a day’ (Dalrymple 2002: 33).

^*英国法律，尤其是在澳大利亚适用的法律，对此有一个颇具启发性的准同义词： terra nullius，字面意思是“无人拥有的土地”。

^* English law, especially as applied in Australia, has a revealing quasi-synonym for this: terra nullius, literally ‘land belonging to nobody’.

^*该公司早年（1612-22 年）曾尝试在北大年（位于印度尼西亚最东端的哈尔马赫拉岛）和当时的暹罗首都阿瑜陀耶设立香料贸易代理处，并于 1669 年在马来半岛的吉打设立锡贸易代理处，但他们总是被荷兰人驱逐。

^* The company had attempted early on (1612-22) to set up agencies for spice trading at Patani (in Halmahera, the far east of Indonesia) and Ayutthaya, then capital of Siam, and in 1669 for tin at Kedah in the Malay peninsula, but they had always been expelled by the Dutch.

^即使在今天，身处英国仍然是理解世界各地英语使用者的最佳切入点：美国、南非、加勒比海地区、印度、新加坡和澳大利亚的英语变体都经常出现在英国媒体上，此外还有一系列英国地方方言（尤其是苏格兰方言、阿尔斯特方言、纽卡斯尔方言、利物浦方言、约克郡方言、伯明翰方言和伦敦东区方言）；所有这些方言都被认为英国观众能够理解。相比之下，美国早在三十多年前就开始为澳大利亚英语电影配音或添加字幕。

^* Even today, location in the UK provides the best medial point from which to understand speakers of English from all over the world: US, South African, Caribbean, Indian, Singaporean and Australian varieties are all frequently heard on the British media, together with a range of UK regional dialects (notably Scots, Ulster, Newcastle, Liverpool, Yorkshire, Birmingham and cockney); all are assumed to be intelligible to a British audience. The USA, by contrast, has for over thirty years already applied dubbing or subtitles to films in the English of Australia.

^很难将此直接归因于英国或美国的影响；在英国于 1971 年加入欧盟之前，英语已经作为（当时的中立）工作语言在欧盟被广泛使用。但在欧洲教授英语时，英式英语仍然是主流选择。

^* It is difficult to attribute this directly either to British or US influence; English was already widely used as a (then neutral) working language of the European Community before UK accession in 1971. But British English remains the majority option when English is taught in Europe.

^* 1950年，欧洲大陆有4200万能够进行英语对话的人；到1980年的三十年间，这一数字增长到6000万（占总人口的18%）；到1990年，这一数字达到8000万（占总人口的21%）；到2000年，这一数字达到1.05亿（占总人口的31%）。考虑到不同年龄段人群的英语水平存在差异——1994年，55岁以上人群中只有10%的人懂一些英语，而15至24岁人群中这一比例高达55%——格拉多尔预计，到2030年，欧洲大陆讲英语的人口数量将达到约1.9亿的峰值。

^* The 42 million Continentals capable of taking part in an English conversation in 1950 grew to 60 million (18 per cent) over the thirty years to 1980; the figure had reached 80 million (21 per cent) by 1990 and 105 million (31 per cent) by 2000. Taking account of differing competence at different ages—in 1994, 10 per cent of the over-fifty-fives knew some English, but 55 per cent of those between fifteen and twenty-four—Graddol expects the numbers of English-speaking Continentals to peak around 190 million in 2030.

†这指的是马修·阿诺德在《文学与教条》序言中那句令人难忘的话：“文化就是了解世界上已经说过和思考过的最佳事物。” 但我们现在不像阿诺德（或麦考利）那样坚信，一种语言可以提供接触整个人类文化的特权。

† An allusion to Matthew Arnold’s memorable remark, in the preface to Literature and Dogma, that ‘Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.’ But we are now less committed than Arnold (or Macaulay) to the view that one language can offer privileged access to the whole sweep of human culture.

^腓尼基语和希伯来语虽然都没有取得巨大的发展，而且语言本身也高度相似，但它们却是语言社群处于这一鸿沟两端的典型例子。至于阿卡德语、阿拉米语、纳瓦特尔语或克丘亚语等语言，我们对它们所处的时代社会知之甚少，因此无法将它们纳入这一框架。

^* Phoenician and Hebrew, though neither achieved great expansion, and both were as languages highly alike, are classic cases of language communities on opposite sides of this divide. As for languages such as Akkadian or Aramaic, Nahuatl or Quechua, we know too little about their contemporary societies to place them in this framework.

第四部分：

今日与明日的语言

PART IV

LANGUAGES TODAY AND TOMORROW

Ohē，iam satis est，ohē，libelle，

iam peruēnimus usque ad umbilīcos。

Tu procedere adhuc et ire quaeris ,

nec summā potes in schidā tenāri ,

sic tamquam tibi rēs peracta non sat ,

quae primā quoque pāginā peracta est.

lam lector queriturque dēficitque ,

iam librārius hoc et ipse dīcit

« Ohē, iam satis est，ohē，诽谤。»

Ohē, iam satis est, ohē, libelle,

iam peruēnimus usque ad umbilīcos.

Tu procedere adhuc et ire quaeris,

nec summā potes in schidā tenāri,

sic tamquam tibi rēs peracta non sit,

quae prīmā quoque pāginā peracta est.

lam lector queriturque dēficitque,

iam librārius hoc et ipse dīcit

« Ohē, iam satis est, ohē, libelle.»

好了好了，够了，好了好了，我的书。

现在我们已经读到扉页了。

你还想继续写下去，到了

最后一页也停不下来，

好像你的主题还没有讲完

似的，其实第一页就已经讲完了。

读者开始抱怨，开始疲惫，

就连出版商都说：

Whoa there, that’s enough, whoa there, my book.

Now we’ve the reached the endpapers.

You want to keep going on and on,

And can’t be stopped on the last page,

As if your subject was not exhausted

As it actually was on the first.

The reader is complaining and flagging,

even the publisher is saying:

“好了好了，够了，好了好了，我的书。”

’Whoa there, that’s enough, whoa there, my book.’

马提亚尔，《警句集》 ，第四卷，第89章（公元88年12月）¹

Martial, Epigrams, iv.89 (December AD 88)¹

13

当前前二十名

13

The Current Top Twenty

语言社群成功的最简单、最生物学的标准是该语言的使用人数。在界定此类社群的边界时，语言学家的主要指导原则是“相互理解”：毕竟，社群是指能够使用该语言相互理解的人群。

The simplest, biological, criterion for success in a language community is the number of users the language has. In setting the boundaries for such a community the linguist’s main guideline is ‘mutual intelligibility’: the community is, after all, the set of people who can understand one another using the language.

这个定义存在诸多难题。首先是实际操作上的难题，即我们无法真正测试不同人群之间是否能够一对一地相互理解。究竟多少理解才算掌握某种语言？如果人们通常都懂邻居的语言，即使邻居说的是另一种语言，他们也能听懂，又该如何解释？这种情况在澳大利亚原住民社区很常见，在世界许多其他多语言地区也同样存在。其次是政治上的难题，例如人们倾向于或想象自己属于某个社群而非其他社群，以及人口普查数据容易将族群成员与其传统语言的使用者混淆。当然，还有许多理论上的难题。尤其重要的是，当语言在语言交界处逐渐过渡到下一种语言时（这种情况经常发生），应该如何计算语言的数量？有时，说A语言的人可以和说B语言的人交流，说B语言的人也可以和说C语言的人交流，但说A语言的人却无法和说C语言的人交流。这种情况在巴基斯坦和印度的北部平原地区很常见，并延伸到尼泊尔，旁遮普语逐渐融入印地语，最终融入尼泊尔语。有时，说 A 语言的人可以听懂说 B 语言的人，但反过来却不行，就像臭名昭著的葡萄牙语和西班牙语一样：相互理解并不总是可能的。

There are many difficulties with this definition. There are practical difficulties, having to do with the impossibility of actually testing whether populations can understand one another, one to one. How much understanding counts as knowing the language? And what if people typically know the language of their neighbours, and so can understand them even when they are speaking a different language? This is a common situation in Aboriginal Australia, but also in many other multilingual parts of the world. Then there are political difficulties, having to do with people’s desired or imagined membership of one community rather than another, and the tendency of census data to confuse members of an ethnic group with speakers of its traditional language. And there are, of course, many theoretical difficulties. Importantly, how many languages should be counted when they fade off at the edges into the next language, something they often do. Sometimes speakers of A can talk to B, and B to C, but A can’t talk to C. This is a common situation in the northern plain of Pakistan and India, extending up into Nepal, Panjabi gradually merging into Hindi and then Nepali. Sometimes speakers of A can understand B, but not vice versa, as in the notorious case of Portuguese and Spanish: intelligibility is not always mutual.

另一个难题在于从历史角度考察语言。毫无疑问，每一代人之间，父母与子女之间，语言的相互理解能力都得到了保证，但这并不足以保证语言在几个世纪以来保持不变。我们很难理解16世纪以前的英语文字，如果我们能听到18世纪祖先的口语，恐怕也难以理解他们的语言。事实上，语言，即使是那些在最标准化、最广泛使用的群体中使用的语言，几乎总是在发生变化。这是否会影响我们对语言特性的评估，进而影响我们对一种语言长期发展成就的判断呢^？

A further difficulty comes when the languages are considered historically. Mutual intelligibility has no doubt always been assured in each generation as between parent and child, but this is not enough to guarantee that the language has stayed the same down the centuries. We can’t easily understand what was written in English before the sixteenth century, and if we could hear their speech, we should probably have difficulty with our ancestors in the eighteenth. In fact, languages, even those spoken in the most standardised and widespread communities, almost always change. Should this have an impact on our assessment of language identity, and so of the success of a language over time?¹

例如，拉丁语就是一个例子。难道仅仅因为没有母语使用者能说出接近罗马帝国时期文本的词汇，我们就应该认为这门语言已经消亡，一段辉煌的传统就此终结吗？或者，我们是否应该认为它已经升入了语言的天堂？各个时期的拉丁语文本至今仍在被阅读，其现代形式，统称为罗曼语族——包括西班牙语、葡萄牙语、法语、意大利语、罗马尼亚语、加泰罗尼亚语、奥克语等等——在世界各地都有人使用，总使用者超过6.6亿，使其成为迄今为止世界上第二大最成功的语言（仅次于汉语普通话）。死亡啊，你的毒钩在哪里？

Consider, for example, the case of Latin. Should this language be considered dead, a noble tradition sadly ended, because it has no native speakers whose words are close to what we find in the texts of the Roman empire? Or should it rather be considered to have gone to language heaven? Its texts from every period are still read, and its modern forms, collectively called the Romance languages—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan and many more—are spoken worldwide, with a total speaker population of over 660 million, making it up to the present the second-most successful language in the world (after Mandarin Chinese). O death, where is thy sting?

尽管如此，我们仍然可以构建一份当今世界最常用语言排行榜，即便为此需要做出一些主观判断。这份排行榜一旦公布，就能为我们提供一些有用的线索，帮助我们了解为什么会有如此多的人使用同一种语言。它还能有效地纠正我们通常依赖欧洲中心主义媒体而造成的语言偏见。

Still, it is possible to construct the league table of the world’s most widespread languages as they are spoken today, even if it is necessary to make a few arbitrary decisions to do so. The table, once revealed, gives useful hints on the factors behind a large body of people coming to speak the same language. It is also a useful corrective to the linguistic bias that tends to be created by our usual reliance on Eurocentric media.

这些数据 ² 基于语言作为第一语言和第二语言的使用情况，也就是说，不仅包括母语使用者，还包括出于其他目的学习该语言并积极使用该语言的人。这些“第二语言”使用者显然是该语言社群的一部分。但我们必须谨慎对待这些数字，以及由此得出的详细排名。这里的数据最终基于人口普查结果，而人口普查结果可能受到政治意图的影响。英语尤其如此，有大量“外语”学习者精通英语并经常使用，即使英语在其所在国家没有官方地位，也可能未被纳入人口普查数据 ³ 。然而，超级语言的身份在实践中并无争议。

These figures² are based on use of the languages as first and second languages, i.e. not just native speakers but also people who have acquired the language for some other purpose and use it actively. Such ‘secondary’ speakers are clearly part of the language’s community. But we must be cautious about the numbers and hence the detailed ranking. The figures here are based ultimately on census returns, which may be subject to distortions with political intent. And English particularly has a large tail of ‘foreign language’ learners who are quite competent in it and use it frequently, even if it plays no official role in their countries, and may be unrecorded in census figures.³ However, the identity of the mega-languages is in practice uncontroversial.

世界语言的人口规模分布本身就值得我们深思。将排名前二十的语言的母语人口加起来，就占了世界人口的57%。事实上，仅排名前十二的语言就占了世界人口的50%，这暗示着其他六千五百多种仍在使用的语言的人口规模有多么渺小。

The size distribution of the world’s languages is a lesson in itself. Adding together the native-speaker communities of these top twenty languages, we already have 57 per cent of the world’s population. Indeed, the top twelve alone account for 50 per cent of the world, hinting at how tiny the populations of most of the other six and a half thousand languages still spoken must be.

世界排名前二十的语言，其起源都位于亚洲南部或东部，或欧洲。没有一种语言来自美洲、大洋洲，甚至（最令人惊讶的是）非洲。^*但很自然地，反过来，这些语言缺失的地区恰恰是世界剩余语言多样性的集中地。

In the world’s top twenty, all the languages have their origins in the south or east of Asia, or in Europe. There is not one from the Americas, from Oceania or (most surprisingly) from Africa.^* But quite naturally, and conversely, these absent areas are precisely where the world’s remaining linguistic diversity is concentrated.

语言可以分为两类：一类是“自然发展”的，另一类是通过“合并与吸收”过程形成的。自然发展主要源于语言起源地的人口增长，但也可能包括向邻近地区的扩张。合并与吸收则将一种语言传播到世界各地不连续的区域，主要通过海上入侵和定居。所有以这种方式传播的语言，如英语、西班牙语、葡萄牙语和法语，都起源于西欧，它们实际上是拉丁语的衍生语言，或深受拉丁语的影响。虽然名单上的其他三种欧洲语言——俄语、德语和意大利语——在近代史上并不以其政府奉行和平扩张领土的方式而闻名，但它们的语言发展实际上主要也是自然发展的结果。值得注意的是，为了尽早消除任何关于语言发展原因的军事主义假设，除了公元第二个千年下半叶欧洲殖民者的活动之外，排名前二十的这些巨型语言的发展，几乎不能归因于帝国侵略。^*

The languages can be divided into two sets: those that have grown ‘organically’ and those that have been put together through processes of ‘merger and acquisition’. Organic growth is principally through population increase in the area of origin, but it can also include encroachment on neighbouring areas. Merger and acquisition spreads a language to discontinuous areas of the world, principally through seaborne invasion and settlement. All the languages that have spread in this latter way, English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, had their origins in western Europe, and indeed are daughter languages of Latin, or profoundly influenced by it. Although the other three European languages in the list, Russian, German and Italian, are not known in recent history for their associated governments’ attachment to peaceful methods of expanding their domains, their linguistic growth has been in practice predominantly organic. It is worth noting, as an early antidote to any militaristic presumptions about the causes of language growth, that outside the activities of the European colonists in the second half of the second millennium AD, very little of the growth of these giant languages in the top twenty can be set down to imperial aggression.^*

那么，是什么促成了这些语言的增长呢？值得注意的是，其中许多语言（二十种中的九种）都通行于以水稻为主食的文明地区（孟加拉语、日语、韩语、吴语和粤语、^爪哇语、泰米尔语、马拉地语、越南语）。显然，水稻能够养活大量人口，而通过控制水稻种植水稻需要高度的组织管理。其他一些并非主要分布在水稻种植区的语言则通行于邻近地区，这些地区已经控制了水稻种植区（例如汉语普通话，以及印地语和乌尔都语，即使它们之间存在区别，但在语言学上也处于方言连续体中）。此外，除了欧洲语言之外，这份名单主要由亚洲两大文化强国——中国和印度的语言构成，这一点也不容忽视。

What does account for their growth, then? It is noticeable that a great many of the languages (nine out of twenty) are spoken in civilisations sustained by rice as a staple crop (Bengali, Japanese, Korean, Wu and Yue Chinese,^† Javanese, Tamil, Marathi, Vietnamese). Evidently, rice is capable of supporting dense and extensive populations, and its cultivation, through controlled flooding, requires a high level of organisation. Other languages which are not predominantly in the rice area are spoken in neighbouring areas that have assumed political control of the rice areas (Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi and Urdu, which are linguistically in a dialect continuum if they are distinct at all). It is also inescapable that, outside the European languages, the list is predominantly made up of languages of the two cultural giants of Asia, China and India.

继续往下看（到前五十名），许多相同的模式也存在：更多的汉语变体（锦语、湘语、客家话、闽语、赣语），更多的印度少数民族语言（古吉拉特语、卡纳达语、马拉雅拉姆语、奥里亚语、旁遮普语、博杰普尔语、阿瓦迪语、信德语），更多的以稻米为主的经济体（缅甸语、巽他语（西爪哇语）、泰语），更多的大型欧洲语言，这些语言都是自然发展起来的（波兰语、塞尔维亚-克罗地亚语），尽管（在一种情况下）它们有着殖民历史（荷兰语）。

Looking farther down the list (to the top fifty), many of the same patterns obtain: more variants of Chinese (Jinyu, Xiang, Hakka, Min, Gan), more Indian minority languages (Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Panjabi, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Sindhi), more rice economies (Burmese, Sundanese (of western Java), Thai), more large European languages, grown organically (Polish, Serbo-Croat), despite (in one case) a colonial past (Dutch).

从政治角度来看，值得注意的是，几乎所有这些语言都至少在一千年来一直处于中央集权统治之下：大规模语言在小规模政治单位的地区难以繁荣发展，尽管奇怪的是，在西欧自然发展起来的意大利语和德语却是例外。显然，意大利的长期历史对此有所解释：在公元5世纪西罗马帝国崩溃之前，意大利一直保持着政治统一；近两个世纪以来达成的政治联盟，正是其如今语言统一的基础，而这种统一可以追溯到那个黄金时代。德语同样是近两个世纪政治的产物；但令人惊讶和印象深刻的是，在过去的2000年里，各种德语方言的使用者仍然保持着足够的联系，以至于接受了共同的文学标准，因为在德语社群历史的早期阶段，整体政治统一性很低。（参见第11章，“奇怪的无效——德语的雄心壮志”，第446页。）

Politically, it is noteworthy that almost all these languages have been under a centralised authority for at least a millennium: large-scale languages do not flourish in areas of small-scale political units, although curiously the languages that have grown organically in western Europe, Italian and German, are exceptions to this. Evidently, the longer-term history of Italy gives something of an explanation: there had been political unity until the breakdown of the western Roman empire in the fifth century AD; the political union achieved in the last two centuries, the basis for its apparent linguistic unity today, harks back to that golden era. German is likewise an artefact of the politics of the last two centuries; but the fact that the speakers of the various German dialects have stayed close enough over the last two millennia to accept a common literary standard is surprising and impressive, for there is little overall political unity at earlier stages of the language community’s history. (See Chapter 11, ‘Curiously ineffective—German ambitions’, p. 446.)

另一个问题涉及在这些有利环境中传播的语言的选择。是否存在某种标准可以预测某个语群中的哪种语言会传播开来并超越其邻近语言？在一个中央集权的王国中，这通常是一个政策问题，无论是有意识的还是无意识的：不出所料，被选作推广的标准通常是首都使用的方言。因此，汉语普通话在历史上是与北京这座城市紧密相关的语言形式，^正如 ^日语与东京紧密相关一样。在中古英语时期，最终占据主导地位并确立标准的方言是伦敦方言。^在各种中古印度方言中，印地语/乌尔都语是德里地区的特征。^俄语起源于东斯拉夫语的莫斯科变体；^越南语基于河内地区；^法语是巴黎的罗曼语。^有时，国家首都会迁移：因此，标准西班牙语源于13世纪中期卡斯蒂利亚王国首都托莱多的方言；^11.韩语据信起源于朝鲜半岛南部的新罗地区，该地区在七至十世纪占据主导地位。12 ^.

Another question concerns the choice of the language that spreads out in these favourable environments. Is there a criterion that predicts which language in a group will spread out to eclipse its neighbours? In a centralised kingdom, this is often a matter of policy, conscious or unconscious: unsurprisingly, the standard chosen for promotion is usually the variety used in the national capital. Hence Mandarin Chinese is historically the form of the language closely associated with the city of Beijing,⁴ as Japanese is with Tokyo.⁵ In Middle English, the dialect that came to predominate and so set the standard was that of London.⁶ Among the various middle Indian dialects, Hindi/Urdu was characteristic of the Delhi region.⁷ Russian is by origin the Moscow variant of eastern Slavonic;⁸ Vietnamese is based on the region of Hanoi;⁹ and French is the Romance speech of Paris.¹⁰ Sometimes, the national capital has moved: so standard Spanish derives from the speech of Toledo, capital of the kingdom of Castile in the mid-thirteenth century;¹¹ and Korean is believed to have originated in the region of Silla in the south of the Korean peninsula, which was dominant in the seventh to tenth centuries.¹²

因此，粗略地说，在语言的政治经济学中，如果某个城市的方言最终成为国家首都，那么它就具有优势；如果某个地区的方言位于热带平原，尤其是盛产水稻的地区，那么它就具有优势；而最重要的是，如果某个地区的方言位于东亚或南亚，那么它就具有优势。但所有这些标准都有例外：事实上，英语最初并不具备这些优势。正如在商业领域一样，并购显然可以超越内生增长。

Grossly, then, one could claim that, in the political economy of languages, it pays to be the dialect of a city that becomes a national capital; it pays to be in a tropical plain, especially if it grows rice; and above all it pays to be in East or South Asia. But all these criteria have exceptions: indeed, English started out with none of these advantages. As in business, it is evident that merger and acquisition can outpace organic growth.

如果仅根据当今世界上使用最广泛的语言的特性来观察语言发展，那么前二十名的排名就无法反映语言发展的动态：例如，哪些语言是新晋语言，哪些语言排名上升，哪些语言排名下降？一个世纪前这个排名会是什么样子？一百年后又会是什么样子？

A disadvantage in basing our observations on the properties of the most widespread languages in the world, as they happen to be today, is that the top twenty list gives no intrinsic sense of the dynamics of language growth: which, for example, are the new entrants, and which languages are moving up, which down? How would the list have looked a century ago, and how will it look a hundred years hence?

要回答这些问题，我们需要将人口统计数据与语言声望的兴衰结合起来。

To answer these questions we need to combine demographics with some sense of language prestige as it waxes and wanes.

人口统计数据是众所周知的：名单上的亚洲语言，其发展是自然而然的，并将继续增长，中国（受政策影响）和日本（由于自然生育率下降）除外。亚洲语言之所以被列入名单，是因为它们所在国家人口众多，而人口增长并非一朝一夕之功。因此，除非这些国家的人口表现出改变语言的趋势（例如，用当地国家语言取代本地区的方言），或者遭受某种规模空前的巨大灾难（其规模之大，堪比16世纪欧洲人到来后席卷美洲的瘟疫），否则它们必须永久保留在名单中^。13

The demographics are a matter of common knowledge: the Asian languages in the list, whose growth has been organic, will continue to grow, with the exceptions of China (by policy) and Japan (through falling natural fertility). The Asian languages are in the list because of their countries’ huge populations, which by their very nature did not develop overnight. Therefore, they must be permanent members of the list, until and unless these populations show some tendency to change their language (for example, to adopt the local national language in place of their own regional speech), or are hit by some immense catastrophe, so frighteningly huge that it would have to be comparable to the epidemics that devastated the Americas after the advent of the Europeans from the sixteenth century.¹³

未来五十年，中国和印度次大陆的语言格局可能会发生一些变化和重新平衡：1995年至2000年间，中国的女性生育率为1.8，日本为1.4，而印度和孟加拉国为3.1，巴基斯坦为5.0。按照这些趋势，预计到2050年，印度的总人口将超过中国；同期，巴基斯坦（主要语言为旁遮普语，约有三分之一的人口使用该语言）将成为世界第三人口大国（超过美国），而孟加拉国（主要语言为孟加拉语）则将保持其第八人口大国的地位。将人口增长率应用于这些语言，主要影响应该是乌尔都语和旁遮普语的使用人数激增，而印度的泰卢固语、马拉地语和泰米尔语等地区性语言的使用人数可能会超过汉语、吴语和粤语等地区性语言。汉语普通话目前遥遥领先（如今每有一位英语、印地语-乌尔都语或西班牙语使用者，汉语普通话使用者就相当于它们的三位），因此它仍将是世界上使用最广泛的语言，尽管五十年后，它的使用规模可能只有其最接近的竞争对手的两倍。

Some jockeying and rebalancing among languages in China and the Indian subcontinent is likely in the next fifty years: the fertility rate per woman in China in the period 1995-2000 has been 1.8, in Japan 1.4, whereas in India and Bangladesh it has been 3.1, in Pakistan 5.0. On these trends, India’s overall population is projected to overtake China’s by 2050; in the same period, Pakistan (majority language Panjabi, spoken by perhaps a third of the population) is set to become the third most populous country in the world (overtaking the USA), but Bangladesh (speaking Bengali) will just hold its position (as eighth most populous). Applying the population growth percentages to these languages, the main effect should be a jump in the speaker numbers for Urdu and Panjabi, while the Indian regional languages Telugu, Marathi and Tamil may overtake the regional forms of Chinese, Wu and Yue. Mandarin Chinese is so far ahead (with three speakers for every one of English, Hindi-Urdu or Spanish today) that it will still be by far the most widespread language in the world, though perhaps in fifty years only double the size of its nearest rival.

阿拉伯语国家的出生率很高，因此未来半个世纪其人口可能会翻一番以上。这足以维持阿拉伯语作为第五大语言的地位；但即便如此，仍然需要将实际上存在的25种不同的口语语言加在一起——除了精英阶层之外，目前还没有形成统一标准的趋势。非洲南部大部分地区的人口增长速度也远超全球平均水平，因此我们可以预期这些地区的语言排名将会上升：如果它们的增长速度与尼日利亚整体人口增长速度保持一致，那么到2050年，使用人数最多的两种语言——豪萨语和约鲁巴语——的母语人口将增长两倍，排名将从第38位和第49位分别上升到第21位和第23位。然而，即便如此，撒哈拉以南非洲的语言在未来50年内仍将无法跻身前20名。

Birth rates are high across the Arabic-speaking countries, so their population may more than double in the next half-century. This should be enough to maintain Arabic’s position as the fifth-biggest language; but it will still be necessary to add together what are in effect twenty-five separate spoken languages—there is no trend towards a unified standard outside elite usage. Most of the more southerly parts of Africa are also growing far beyond the global average, so we can expect its languages to move up the league table: if they keep pace with Nigeria’s population as a whole, the two largest, Hausa and Yoruba, will treble their native-speaker populations by 2050, rising from thirty-eighth and forty-ninth positions to twenty-first and twenty-third. Even with such growth, however, the languages of sub-Saharan Africa will remain outside the top twenty for the next fifty years.

不出所料，榜单上的欧洲语言处境更为脆弱。德语和意大利语之所以拥有如此庞大的用户群体，主要得益于本国人口的自然增长；然而，就目前的生育率而言，这两个国家的人口数量注定会下降，未来五十年内降幅可能高达10%。这将足以使德语跌至前二十名末尾，而意大利语则可能彻底跌出榜单。但就目前的情况来看，这两个国家人口数量的下降很可能会被移民的增加所弥补，从而有效地通过外来人口的加入来维持其语言社群的稳定。

Unsurprisingly, the European languages on the list are in a much more fragile position. German and Italian have owed their large numbers to organic growth of their home populations; in terms of current fertility rates, though, these are set to fall, perhaps by as much as 10 per cent in the next fifty years. This would be enough to demote German towards the bottom of the top twenty, and relegate Italian altogether. But any decrease in either of these countries is in present conditions likely to be made up by increased immigration, effectively maintaining speaker communities through foreign recruitment.

俄语也在衰落。它曾是庞大帝国的通用语，鼎盛时期，其疆域横跨整个北亚，从高加索山脉延伸至日本海，形成一个巨大的新月形区域，而这在一定程度上促进了其在东欧的自然增长。然而，目前大俄罗斯剩余地区的人口正在减少；而在人口尚未减少的中亚新独立国家，人们也逐渐意识到，他们与邻国之间早已存在通用语——突厥语族语言，这些语言彼此密切相关且互通。如果这些语言还不够，人们也越来越倾向于认为，采用英语而非俄语作为更广泛的交流语言，或许更有利于他们的全球联系。综上所述，俄语的未来并不乐观。

Russian too is in decline. Augmenting its organic growth in eastern Europe, it has had a role as the lingua franca of a vast empire, which at its height took in the whole of north Asia in a gigantic crescent from the Caucasus to the Sea of Japan. At the moment, however, populations are shrinking all across the remaining parts of greater Russia; and where they are not, in the newly independent states of central Asia, people are reawakening to the fact they have a pre-existing lingua franca to use with the neighbours in their own, closely related and mutually intelligible, Turkic languages. If these do not suffice, the people are also increasingly coming to believe that their global links may be better served by adopting English rather than Russian as their language of wider communication. For all these reasons, the future does not look rosy for Russian.

其他主要的欧洲语言，如英语、西班牙语、葡萄牙语和法语，其地位都归功于公元第二个千年下半叶统治世界的殖民帝国。这些语言源于殖民地居民，他们在新的、迁徙的家园中迅速发展壮大，移民的力量与自身的自然增长相辅相成；同时，它们也以牺牲殖民地原有的本土语言为代价而传播开来：如此一来，使用范围更广的语言往往最终垄断了所有的交流。

The other major European languages, English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, all owe their status to the colonial empires that came to dominate the earth in the second half of the second millennium AD. They are the languages of colonial populations that were able to grow massively in their new, transplanted, homes, adding the strength of immigrants to their natural increase; they were also able to spread at the expense of languages previously local to the colonised lands: in this way, languages of wider communication often ended up monopolising all the communication.

除了法语之外，其他所有语言的前殖民地人口如今都远远超过了其母国：美国的人口是英国的四倍多，墨西哥几乎是西班牙的三倍，巴西是葡萄牙的十七倍。很难预测五十年后它们在全球最广泛使用的语言中的地位。西班牙语和葡萄牙语在那些人口仍在强劲增长的国家中应该会保持其份额：例如，预计墨西哥和巴西在此期间的人口将增长约50%，美洲和非洲的其他殖民地的情况也大致相同。与此同时，美国的人口可能会增长四分之一，但这可能对英语群体没有好处——值得注意的是，人口增长主要集中在西班牙语使用者身上。

For all of them except French, their most populous ex-colony now vastly outnumbers their motherland: the USA has over four times the population of the UK, Mexico almost three times that of Spain, Brazil seventeen times that of Portugal. It is extremely difficult to predict their positions among the most widespread languages of the world fifty years from now. Spanish and Portuguese should maintain their share in countries that are still growing strongly: Mexico and Brazil, for example, are expected to add some 50 per cent to their populations in this period, and the other colonies in the Americas and Africa will not be that different. Meanwhile, the USA may add a quarter to its population, although this may not benefit the English-language community—significantly, the growth is mainly among Spanish speakers.

事实上，法语和英语的未来最难预测。这两种语言可以被视为全球化的载体，各自以某种方式成为与更广阔世界沟通的通用语。它们的母语使用者往往集中在人口已经稳定甚至可能正在减少的国家。这意味着它们未来的发展前景有限。然而，这些国家在经济、文化和军事方面也同样是世界上最具影响力的国家。因此，出于商业和文化原因，英语和法语被世界各地的人们广泛学习为第二语言，而这些原因都与这两种语言的声望息息相关。尤其就法语而言，其政治地位已根深蒂固，因为法国的许多前殖民地，特别是中非地区，都已将其定为官方语言。（参见第十一章“法语国家”，第419页。）至于英语，其声望有时与历史渊源关系不大：例如，波罗的海周边地区学习英语的兴趣激增，而该地区从未与英国或美国有过任何往来。更普遍地说，以美国为中心的流行文化目前在全球范围内广受欢迎。但正如我们所见，这种影响的长期语言效应可能出人意料地短暂。（另见第十四章“前路漫漫”，第541页。）

In fact, it is for French and English that the future is hardest to predict. These are the languages that might be seen as vehicles of globalisation, each in its way a lingua franca for contact with a wider world. Their native-speaker populations tend to be in countries where the population has stabilised and may even be decreasing. This would imply that their prospects for future growth are limited. However, those same countries are the most influential in the world, economically, culturally and militarily. As a result, English and French are widely acquired as second languages by people all over the world, for business and cultural reasons that have everything to do with the prestige of the languages. In the case of French especially, the language’s status is locked in politically, since so many of France’s ex-colonies, especially in central Africa, have adopted it as their official language. (See Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 419.) As for English, the prestige has sometimes very little to do with historic links: witness the current surge of interest in learning English around the Baltic Sea, a zone that has never had dealings with Britain or America. More generally, US-centred mass culture enjoys global popularity at the moment. But the long-term linguistic effect of this, as we have seen, may be surprisingly transient. (See also Chapter 14, ‘Way to go’, p. 541.)

如今，全球语言的未来平衡格局正处于激烈的争论之中。从人口统计学角度来看，随着世界其他地区绝对财富和相对财富的增长，欧洲语言（尤其是英语）的地位原本预计会下降。（最近一个重要的里程碑是，互联网上英语流量的总和已经超过了其他语言。）但随着财富的增长，学习和使用这些语言的需求似乎也在不断增加，因为它们不再被视为殖民统治的象征，而是被视为进入全球体系的关键钥匙。从某种意义上说，这些语言作为通用语的重要性，以及它们作为超越地域利益的生活方式象征的意义，抵消了它们作为母语主导地位的下降。

The future balance among languages worldwide is now very much in contention. Demographically, the role of the European languages, and especially English, could have been expected to decline, as the rest of the world grows both absolutely, and in terms of relative wealth. (One key milestone was passed recently, when English traffic on the Internet was exceeded by the total in other languages.) But as that wealth grows, there appears to be an increasing demand to learn and use these languages, for they are now seen less as symbols of colonial domination and more as crucial keys for access to the global system. In some sense, the languages’ importance in the role of lingua franca, and as symbols of commitment to a way of life that goes beyond local interests, counteracts the decline of their dominance as first languages.

这种内向发展与外向发展之间的张力，即随着母语人口的增长，母语的重要性日益凸显，而与此同时，通用语也因其被视为连接更广阔世界的纽带而日益普及，这种张力不仅存在于全球层面。从本质上讲，这并非新鲜事：在为超越部落和社群摩擦、建立联邦国家而进行的斗争中，同样的张力由来已久。

This tension between inward and outward growth, between the increasing importance of a mother tongue as its speaker population grows and the concurrent popularity of a lingua franca seen as developing links to a wider world, is felt not only at this, global, level. In principle, it is nothing new: the same tension has a long history in the struggles to transcend tribal and communal frictions in order to build federated nations.

值得注意的是，印尼最大的两种语言——爪哇语（7500万）和巽他语（2700万）——均通行于人口稠密的爪哇岛，且发展迅速，其使用人数远超印尼语（1700万）。印尼语在语言学上与马来语并无二致，马来语是东印度群岛的通用语，因此不仅在印尼使用，还在马来西亚、文莱和新加坡等国使用，总共有4700万使用者。^*对于印尼的大多数人，如同世界上的大多数人一样，本地生活及其人际关系仍然远比国家或全球抱负更为重要。

It is notable that the two largest languages in Indonesia, Javanese (75 million) and Sundanese (27 million), both spoken on the highly populated island of Java, are growing fast, and are far larger than what is promoted as the national language of the country, Bahasa Indonesia (17 million)—which is linguistically none other than Malay, the lingua franca of the East Indies, and as such spoken not only in Indonesia but also in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore, with 47 million speakers in all.^* For most people in Indonesia, as in the world, local life and its contacts still loom far larger than national or global aspirations.

同样，在东非，斯瓦希里语是通用语。这种语言起源于班图语系，但因与阿拉伯语的贸易往来而发生转变（参见第三章“阿拉伯语——雄辩与平等：‘顺从’的胜利”，第103页）。斯瓦希里语的总使用者约有3000万，但其中只有500万人将其作为母语自然习得。尽管如此，它仍然是坦桑尼亚的官方语言，也是邻国肯尼亚和该地区许多其他国家使用最广泛的语言。在所有这些地方，它的使用者都少于该国使用人数最多的语言。

Likewise, in East Africa the lingua franca is Swahili. This language, of Bantu origin but transformed through trade contact with Arabic (see Chapter 3, ‘Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission”, p. 103), has some 30 million speakers in all, but only 5 million of them acquired it naturally as their first language. Nevertheless, it is the official language of Tanzania, and the most widely spoken language in neighbouring Kenya and many other countries in the area. Everywhere, it has fewer speakers than the countries’ largest languages.

对于很多目的而言，一个语言社群的人数多少并不重要，重要的是这些人是谁——以及他们的分布情况如何。

For many purposes, it is less important how many there are in a linguistic community than who those people are—and how well distributed.

^事实上，非洲起源的第一种语言是埃及阿拉伯语，拥有4600万使用者，排名仅为第二十三位。阿拉伯语的不同“方言”（超过25种）彼此之间存在相当大的沟通障碍，因此在这份列表中将它们视为独立的语言是恰当的。如果将它们合并为一个单一的超语言社群，并以精英阶层使用古典阿拉伯语作为通用语为纽带，那么其使用者总数将超过2.05亿，介于孟加拉语和葡萄牙语之间。掌握古典阿拉伯语的人数约为1亿。（阿拉伯语的遥远起源，如同所有闪米特语一样，位于非洲。参见第三章“阿卡德语——世界领先的技术：识字模式”，第58页。非洲第二大语言是豪萨语，拥有3900万母语和第二语言使用者。）

^* The first language of African origin is in fact Egyptian Arabic, with 46 million speakers, which ranks it no higher than twenty-third. The different ‘dialects’ of Arabic, of which there are over twenty-five, offer quite solid barriers to mutual intelligibility, so they are well cast in this list as distinct languages. If they are consolidated as a single hyper-language community, united by the elite’s use of classical Arabic as a lingua franca, they would amount to something over 205 million, placing them between Bengali and Portuguese. Those who know classical Arabic number about 100 million. (The distant ancestry of Arabic, like all the Semitic languages, lies in Africa. See Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 58. The next major African language is Hausa, with 39 million native and secondary speakers.)

†在西方，他们更广为人知的名字是上海人和广东人。

† They are better known in the West as Shanghainese and Cantonese.

^尽管如此，它与印度尼西亚的联系非常紧密，以至于在新成立的东帝汶国家中，它被明确地弃用为官方语言，而东帝汶则出于怀旧，选择了恢复使用早期殖民宗主国的语言——葡萄牙语。

^* Nevertheless, its association with Indonesia was strong enough for it to be pointedly discarded as an official language in the new state of East Timor, which has nostalgically opted instead for a return to the language of the earlier colonial power, Portuguese.

14

展望未来

14

Looking Ahead

什么是旧物

What is old

我们全球调查得出的最显著结论是，人口迁徙——历史上传播语言的首要力量——至今仍占据主导地位。农民的迁徙将中国人带到了长江南岸及更远的地方；游牧民族和难民的迁徙将阿拉姆语从叙利亚带回东方，沿幼发拉底河而下到达巴比伦；商人的迁徙将迦太基语从推罗带过地中海，到达迦太基和北非。公元前二至一世纪，一些以国家殖民地形式组织起来的迁徙，虽然也吸引了志愿者，却将拉丁语播撒在了意大利北部和法国南部的古高卢人中间；公元十七世纪，英语在北美东海岸传播开来；十九世纪，英语在澳大利亚海岸传播开来。即使在今天，西班牙语使用者跨越格兰德河向北迁徙的近乎自发的动态，仍然是英语在美国占据绝对主导地位的最大挑战。

The most evident judgement to emerge from our global survey is that migration of peoples, the first force in history to spread languages, dominates to this day. A farmers’ migration brought Chinese south to the banks of the Yangtze Kiang and beyond; nomads’ and refugees’ migrations brought Aramaic east from Syria and down the Euphrates to Babylon; a merchants’ migration brought Punic across the Mediterranean sea from Tyre to Carthage and North Africa. Migrations organised politically as state colonies, but still attracting volunteers, seeded Latin among the Gauls of northern Italy and southern France in the second and first centuries BC, as they seeded English along the eastern shores of North America in the seventeenth AD, and along the shores of Australia in the nineteenth. Even now the quasi-spontaneous migration dynamic of Spanish speakers moving north across the Rio Grande is the greatest challenge to the complete dominance of English in the USA.

似乎在19世纪印度英语发展出现有趣现象之前，外国征服只有在伴随大量本族移民涌入的情况下，才会导致语言转变。从这个意义上讲，当军事征服者将其语言传播到新的领土时，真正的原因在于移民而非征服本身。

It appears that, until the interesting developments with English in India in the nineteenth century, foreign conquests led to language shift only if the conquest was followed up with substantial immigration of people who already spoke the conquerors’ language. In this sense, it is migration rather than conquest which is really at root when a military conqueror apparently spreads his language into new territories.

吸引移民的重要性或许可以解释我们观察到的希腊帝国和罗马帝国之间的一个主要差异。尽管希腊人在政治上拥有稳固的控制权，但亚历山大征服波斯帝国的遥远行省后，希腊语的使用仅仅停留在表面。在波斯本土，帕提亚人重新确立本土统治后，希腊语在五六代人之后便销声匿迹；即使在叙利亚、巴勒斯坦和埃及，尽管希腊的行政管理在罗马人统治下延续了千年之久，但当时的通用语言始终是阿拉姆语（埃及语为埃及语）。当阿拉伯人在七世纪接管统治权后，希腊语在几代人之内便彻底消失，即便是在千年之后。相比之下，罗马在西欧大陆的征服，其语言影响却具有持久性。即使在没有明确殖民地的地方（我们已经注意到这些殖民地如何为拉丁语在意大利北部的传播铺平了道路——参见第七章“伦：凯尔特人的迅猛崛起”，第293页），罗马军队也持续不断地为整个帝国输送移民，退伍老兵常常定居下来，耕种他们曾经服役过的土地^。¹

The importance of attracting immigrants may account for a major difference that we noted between the Greek and Roman empires. Greek-speaking only superficially followed Alexander’s conquests in the far-flung provinces of the Persian empire, even though Greek control was politically secure. In Persia itself, Greek was eliminated after five or six generations when Parthians reasserted indigenous control; and even in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, where Greek administration was taken up under the Romans and so continued for a millennium, the popular language for all that time remained Aramaic (with Egyptian in Egypt). When the Arabs took over administration in the seventh century, Greek was eliminated altogether within a couple of generations, even after a thousand years. By contrast, the Roman conquests on the continent of western Europe have proved permanent in their linguistic effects. Even where there were no explicit colonies (and we have noted how these led the way for Latin in northern Italy—see Chapter 7, ‘Rún: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts’, p. 293), all over the empire the Roman army provided a continuing source of settlers, veterans often settling down and working the land where they had served.¹

同样，早期英语移民涌入北美的迅猛势头，对十七、十八世纪英语在殖民地语言中的普及起到了至关重要的作用。（参见第十二章“西进！”，第481页。）而加拿大法语的兴起，恰恰印证了这一规律，这得益于一项旨在帮助法语女性移民的政策。（参见第十一章“法语国家”，第414页。）后来涌入北美的大规模移民则在某种意义上是个例外：它并没有削弱北美大陆当时已形成的英语主导地位，因为移民通常不会迁徙或定居在与自己语言相同的人群中；因此，这些后来的移民大多倾向于学习英语，而不是将自己的语言传承给新邻居。尽管存在许多社区联系，但这种趋势依然盛行。

Likewise, the cracking early pace of English-speaking immigration into North America was influential in promoting English over all the other colonial languages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (See Chapter 12, ‘Westward Ho!’, p. 481.) And as the exception that proves the rule, Canadian French established itself, and throve, through a deliberate policy of assisted emigration for French-speaking women. (See Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 414.) The later massive immigration to North America was an exception in a different sense: it did not diminish the now settled English-speaking tendency of the continent because immigrants did not, in general, move or settle in with others of the same language; as a result these later immigrants tended mostly to acquire English, rather than passing their own languages on to their new neighbours. Despite many community links, this trend prevailed.

移民是语言传播的根本动力，但新移民定居的倾向，以及由此取代使用不同语言的原有居民，往往会因新移民更高的生育率而加剧和强化。由于他们发现自己在某些方面比当地居民更有优势，因此他们往往生育更多子女，几代之后人口数量就超过了当地居民。这很可能一直是大规模移民的必然结果——如果没有某种优势，无论是健康、财富，甚至是接受较低工资，很难想象任何移民群体如何能够超越当地居民而站稳脚跟——这一点在美国、澳大利亚和新西兰的早期历史上尤为明显，这些国家的人口增长速度惊人，并有人口普查记录在案。在所有这些案例中，移民都带来了温带地区的农作物和牲畜。然而，我们可以推测，类似的因素在过去肯定经常发生——例如，当最早一批闪米特语使用者将耕作作物引入此前只有狩猎、采集和畜牧业的新地区时，西亚许多地区的语言发展便受益匪浅。家庭规模的扩大意味着对土地需求的增加，同时也意味着需要更大规模的军队来夺取和保卫土地，而所有这些都有利于这些务农移民所使用的语言的发展。事实上，这正是我们在第13章中探讨的众多大型语言社群形成的原因——“自然增长”。

Immigration is the basic seed of language spread, but very often the propensity of newcomers to settle, and so displace older populations with different languages, is compounded and reinforced by the greater fertility of the newcomers. Finding themselves at some sort of advantage over the natives, they turn out to have larger families, and hence in a few generations are more numerous than the indigenous population. This has very likely always been a concomitant of large-scale immigration—without some sort of advantage, whether in health, wealth or even acceptance of lower wages, it is difficult to see how any immigrant population can become established over residents—but it has been particularly clear in the early history of the USA, Australia and New Zealand, where the growth was meteoric and documented by census. In all these cases, the immigrants were introducing temperate-zone crops and livestock. One can conjecture, however, that similar factors must have played out very often in the past—for example, in favour of the first Semitic speakers in many parts of western Asia, when they first introduced arable crops into new territories that had previously known only hunters, gatherers and pastoralists. Larger families mean heightened demand for land, but also larger armies to take and defend it, and all this benefits the languages the farming immigrants speak. This is in fact nothing other than the ‘natural growth’ that we found responsible for so many large language communities in Chapter 13.

人们常说的语言传播因素之一，我们发现其长期影响甚微。那就是贸易。正式的贸易关系当然由来已久，至少与文字一样古老。（我们看到，美索不达米亚文字的起源似乎是对贸易代币的重新诠释（第三章，“苏美尔语——第一种古典语言：死后的生命”，第51页）。）但是，没有哪个以贸易闻名的社群能够将其语言永久地作为方言，甚至作为通用语传递给其客户。这种活动至多只会导致语言的渗透，甚至扩散，因为商人作为移民永久定居于客户社群的情况相当罕见。迦太基就是一个罕见的例子，它将商人使用的腓尼基语（或称布匿语）传播到了北非的大部分地区。总的来说，这些商人使用的语言——例如丝绸之路上的粟特语、印度洋地区的阿拉伯语以及后来的葡萄牙语——往往仅限于商业用途，难以突破这一局限。一旦市场消失或被其他语言取代，这些语言也会随之消亡。因此，认为英语如今受益于其全球商业语言地位的说法需要谨慎对待：英语或许是当今务实的选择，但贸易格局会随着时间推移而改变，单凭贸易联系并不能保证语言社群的延续。

One factor that is often credited for language spread we have found of very little long-term effect. This is trade. Formal trade relations are of course of great antiquity, at least as old as written language. (We saw that the origin of written language in Mesopotamia seems to have been due to a reinterpretation of trading tokens (Chapter 3, ‘Sumerian—the first classical language: Life after death’, p. 51).) But no community famous for specialisation in trade has passed its language on permanently as a vernacular, or even as a lingua franca, to its customers. At most such activity tends to infiltration of the language, or even diffusion, since the instances where merchants have set up permanently as immigrants into the customer community are rather rare. Carthage, which carried the merchants’ language Phoenician, or Punic, into a substantial part of North Africa would be one such rare example. In general, these merchants’ languages—other examples are Sogdian along the Silk Road, Arabic and later Portuguese in the Indian Ocean—do not make the jump from a restricted business use. When the market disappears, or others muscle in, the language too is dropped. So suggestions that English nowadays is benefiting from its position as the language of global business need to be received with some scepticism: English may well be today’s pragmatic preference, but trade patterns change over time, and a trade connection alone will not guarantee a language community.

然而，商人到访异域并非总是只带来货物。有时，他们也会带来新的信仰，并亲自传教，或携带职业传教士一同前往。如果这种信仰与某种语言相关，那么这些传教活动便可成为新语言传播的重要途径。公元第一个千年，梵语和巴利语随着印度教和佛教商人或海盗传入东南亚；一千年后，来自印度的其他商人带来了伊斯兰教，而最早的欧洲商人，主要是葡萄牙人，则带来了天主教。在这四种宗教中，每种宗教都有其对应的语言，但只有基督教——对语言的重视程度最低——似乎将其语言推广为通用语；梵语、巴利语和阿拉伯语仍然仅限于宗教仪式，而葡萄牙语却成为了许多皈依者的第一语言，并以克里奥尔语的形式流传至今，从印度到马来亚都有其应用。而英国东印度公司最初来到印度只是为了牟利，却在那里停留了足够长的时间，让传教士们得以壮大势力，最终也开始向当地居民教授英语。

However, merchants do not always just bring goods on their visits to exotic locations. Sometimes they bring with them a new faith, and either act as missionaries for it themselves, or bring vocational missionaries with them. These missions can be important vehicles of a new language, if the faith has such an association. The Sanskrit and Pali that reached South-East Asia in the first millennium AD came with Hindu and Buddhist traders or buccaneers; a thousand years later, other traders from India were bringing in Islam, while the first European merchants, mostly Portuguese, were offering them Catholic Christianity. Of these four religions, each with an attendant language, only Christianity—the least language-conscious—seems to have projected its language as a vernacular; while Sanskrit, Pali and Arabic have remained languages confined to worship, Portuguese actually became the first language of many converts, and survives to this day in popular creolised forms from India to Malaya. And the English East India Company, which had come to India merely in search of profit, stayed long enough for missionaries to build up their strength and end up teaching the population English too.

但传教士并非总是怀有不可告人目的的商人。传教本身可能就是远行的重要动机：这样的朝圣传教士传播了许多语言，尤其是在亚洲。公元一世纪，佛教僧侣绕过喜马拉雅山脉，途经阿富汗和帕米尔高原，将四圣谛带给中国人，同时也带来了神圣的梵语。八世纪，景教僧侣从叙利亚经波斯一路北上，抵达丝绸之路的入口，并通过这条路将基督教——以及至少短暂的阿拉姆语——带入中国腹地。他们此前已将阿拉姆语传播到印度南端。（参见第三章“第二幕间奏：信仰的盾牌”，第88页。）穆斯林也沿着这条跨亚洲路线传播他们的信仰，这种信仰至今仍然存在，尤其是在中国沿海地区；而没有阿拉伯语，伊斯兰教是不可想象的。就在不久前的十九世纪，新教基督教传教士将英语首次带到了中非和太平洋的大部分岛屿。（参见第十二章“席卷全球”，第507页及之后。）

But missionaries are not always traders with an ulterior motive. Missions may themselves offer a major motive for travel to distant parts: and such pilgrim missionaries have spread many languages, especially in Asia. In the first century AD Buddhist monks rounded the Himalayas, through Afghanistan and the Pamirs, to take the Four Noble Truths to the Chinese, and with them sacred Sanskrit. In the eighth century Nestorians, coming all the way from Syria via Persia, reached the entrance of the same Silk Road, and through it brought Christianity—and at least briefly Aramaic—into the heart of China. They had already taken it to the southern tip of India. (See Chapter 3, ‘Second interlude: The shield of faith’, p. 88.) Muslims too had come along the same trans-Asiatic route to spread their faith, which survives, especially on the coasts of China, to this day; and Islam is unthinkable without Arabic. Just recently, in the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missions brought the first words in English into central Africa, and to most of the Pacific Islands. (See Chapter 12, ‘The world taken by storm’, pp. 507ff.)

遗憾的是，传教的动机并非总是如此和平。换句话说，强势民族有时会感到一种冲动，通常被视为一种责任，要将自己的信仰强加于被征服的异族，以“启迪”他们。在极端情况下——这在公元第二个千年并不少见——这种责任会演变成一种正义的侵略：信徒们必须试图击败邻国，仅仅是为了将自己的信仰强加于他们。

Sadly, missionary motives are not always so peaceable. Put another way, dominant peoples sometimes feel an urge, usually conceived as a duty, to impose their faith on foreigners they have defeated, to ‘enlighten’ them. In extreme cases—not rare in the second millennium AD—the duty is sharpened into a righteous aggression: the believers must attempt to defeat their neighbours simply to impose their faith on them.

这种“十字军东征”的动机似乎是源自希伯来启示的宗教——犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教——的典型特征。对于犹太人而言，由于他们的力量几乎总是远逊于敌人或邻邦，因此这种动机有所缓和，他们只能怀着怀旧之情拥护这一教义，回忆起圣经中早期征服的故事。对于穆斯林而言，始终存在着这样一种教义：有经者（ahl al-kitāb） ——包括犹太人、基督徒、琐罗亚斯德教徒以及穆斯林自身——理应享有特殊的宽容，因此他们对大多数被征服者都表现出了一定的克制。而基督徒则承担了以宗教之名发动侵略性和帝国主义战争的全部艰辛。

This ‘crusading’ motive seems particularly characteristic of the faiths derived from Hebrew revelation, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It has been mitigated for the Jews by the fact that they have almost always been in much smaller force than their enemies or neighbours, and hence can only endorse the doctrine nostalgically, recalling biblical tales of their early conquests. For Muslims, there was always the doctrine that ahl al-kitāb, Peoples of the Book—Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians along with Muslims themselves—were owed a special tolerance, and so a certain moderation was shown to most of those they defeated. It fell to Christians to try out the full rigours of waging aggressive and imperialistic wars in the name of religion.

这一教义形成于十二、十三世纪对抗伊斯兰教的十字军东征时期，当时基督教徒的优势不足以建立长期的统治地位。但在十四、十五世纪将摩尔人驱逐出西班牙，尤其是在美洲，双方的力量远没有那么均衡。西班牙和葡萄牙国王获得了正式授权，可以剥夺其他国王的领土，建立自己的帝国，其明确目的就是为了扩大天主教的势力范围。^然而，这项全球性研究最讽刺的发现之一是，在整个拉丁美洲，正是宗教团体倾向于维护美洲本土语言的使用：只有当欧洲人不再特别关注和关心原住民时，欧洲语言才开始逐渐取代其他语言。（参见第 10 章“国家的解决之道：西班牙化”，第 373 页。）无论基督徒最初的意图是什么，传播语言的都是定居者，而不是传教士或他们十字军东征的信仰。

The doctrine was forged in the crusades against Islam of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the Christians had insufficient advantage to create long-term dominance. But in the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even more in the Americas, forces were far less even. The kings of Spain and Portugal received formal authorisation to dispossess other kings, and establish their own empires, explicitly in order to extend the domains of the Catholic faith.² But it was one of the greater ironies of this global review to discover that all over Latin America it was the religious communities which tended to sustain use of America’s indigenous languages: Europe’s languages began to wipe the others out only when the special concern with and for natives lapsed. (See Chapter 10, ‘The state’s solution: Hispanización’, p. 373.) Whatever the Christians’ original intent, it was settlers, rather than missionaries or their crusading Faith, who spread languages.

有什么新内容

What is new

人性或许不会发生太大变化，但在过去的五百年里——也就是我们所说的“海上语言”时期——出现了一些新的因素，从根本上影响了语言的传播能力。

Human nature may not change much, but in the last half-millennium—the period we have represented as Languages by Sea—some new factors have come into play which affected radically the capacity of languages to spread.

首先是全球航海。发展这项技术的动机是商业性的，源于十五世纪欧洲人渴望以更低的价格获取亚洲商品，尤其是香料。这一愿望很快实现，但随之而来的一个直接副作用却是反向的——欧洲人在遥远的亚洲和美洲逐渐建立起语言社群，这些社群很快又在当地发展壮大。语言社群不再需要彼此相邻，也不再需要通过穿越熟悉海域的短途航行来连接。

The first of these is global navigation. The motive for developing this was mercantile, a fifteenth-century European ambition to acquire Asian commodities, especially spices, more cheaply. The ambition was very soon fulfilled, but an immediate side effect was to operate in the reverse direction—the gradual establishment of speech communities of Europeans far away in Asia and the Americas, communities that very soon gained new members locally. It was no longer necessary for speech communities to be contiguous, or linked by brief cruises across familiar seas.

我们可以列举一些促成这一突破的先驱——十五世纪初中国与东南亚的贸易曾短暂扩展到整个印度洋（参见第四章“从黄河到长江的语言”，第147页）；公元第一个千年初期，阿拉伯、波斯和印度商人将印度洋纳入其版图；更早的波利尼西亚航海家驾驶着独木舟在太平洋航行，逐岛探索，抵达了那里所有适宜居住的陆地；甚至还有数千年前穿越东印度群岛、横渡托雷斯海峡到达澳大利亚的远古航海家。然而，这些先驱者都未能一劳永逸地绘制出整个世界的地图，完整地记录下所有待发现的陆地及其位置。到了十六世纪，世界从一个开放的系统缩小成一个封闭而明确的区域，虽然仍然充满危险，但至少第一次变得可以掌控。现在，人们可以想象，同语者可以在大洋彼岸，甚至远隔重洋的地方安家落户：虽然可能难以联系，但他们的住址是公开的。尽管他们分散在世界各地，但彼此之间仍能保持联系。

It is possible to quote forerunners for this breakthrough—the Chinese commerce with South-East Asia that briefly expanded to take in the whole Indian Ocean in the early fifteenth century (see Chapter 4, ‘Language from Huang-he to Yangtze’, p. 147); the Arab, Persian and Indian traders who had taken the Indian Ocean for their domain in the early first millennium AD; the much earlier Polynesian mariners of the Pacific in their outrigger canoes, who island by island reached every habitable landmass there; indeed, the primeval navigators who many thousands of years ago made their way through the East Indies and across the Torres Straits to Australia. But none of these forerunners succeeded in mapping the whole world once and for all, providing the complete inventory of what lands there were to be discovered, and where they lay. In the sixteenth century, the world shrank from an open system to a closed and definite sphere, still dangerous but now for the first time manageable. Now it became conceivable that fellow-speakers could set up home on the other side of an ocean, indeed many oceans away: they might be hard to reach, but their address would be known. Though they were scattered across the world, contact could be maintained.

一旦这种由不连续的社群组成的网络建立起来，并依靠定期的海上交通得以维系，社群间关系的范围也随之发生了变化。在美洲，流行病的爆发迅速调整了居民社群和外来社群的相对规模；在拉丁美洲，广泛的通婚很快模糊了两者之间的语言和文化界限。结果，移民社群通过同化或简单的驱逐，在很大程度上取代了原有的居民。^*除了事件发生的规模之大之外，这本身并无新意；例如，罗马人入侵高卢或撒克逊人占领英格兰时，也必然发生过类似的事情。但在印度和东印度群岛，土著社群并不容易受到移民带来的疾病的影响：相反，当地的地方性疾病使得移民人口数量保持在较低水平。其结果是，欧洲人这一外来少数族裔社群始终保持着较小的规模，他们生活在居民社群的边缘，但其影响力却日益增强。这是一个全新的情况，而应对这种情况的措施——通过再教育来传播语言——也是全新的。

Once this network of discontinuous communities had been established, maintainable through regular sea traffic, the scope of inter-communal relations changed too. In the Americas, the onset of epidemic disease very quickly readjusted the relative size of resident and incomer communities, and in Latin America extensive interbreeding soon blurred the borders, linguistic and cultural, between them. As a result, the settler communities largely replaced, by incorporation or by simple displacement, the previous resident populations.^* Nothing new there, except for the continental scale of what was happening; something analogous must have happened, for example, when the Romans invaded Gaul, or the Saxons took over England. But in India and the East Indies, the indigenous community was not vulnerable to disease brought by the immigrants: on the contrary, the diseases endemic there kept the immigrant population small. The result was a persistently small minority community of outsiders, the Europeans, living on the edge of the resident population, but increasingly influential within it. This was a new situation and the response to it, the spread of a language by re-education, was new too.

实际上，少数外来者将其具有威望的语言传递给了多数族群的精英阶层，并非将其作为通用语，而是作为一种文化招募的象征。这一发展的新颖之处在于，它发生在英属印度，而非与其高度相似的荷属东印度群岛。荷兰东印度公司和英国东印度公司都将一种日耳曼语带到了南亚这个历史悠久的商业市场；它们都成功地取代了欧洲竞争对手——葡萄牙人和法国人；它们都吸引了热衷于向当地居民传播其精神世界观的新教传教士。但荷兰人始终满足于使用当地的通用语——马来语——作为其宗教和行政语言。领主们的世界与其当地供应商、雇员以及（最终的）臣民的世界截然不同，而且这种情况将一直持续下去。（参见第十一章“荷兰入侵者”，第395页。）只有英国人提供了改用英语的途径。他们这样做，固然是迫于本国传教士的压力，但也来自本土居民和许多印度精英阶层的压力。当时人们对这片殖民地的态度发生了转变，他们不再仅仅将其视为牟利之地，而是将其视为英属印度，需要作为大不列颠的一部分加以发展。

Effectively, the outsider minority passed its prestige language on to the elite of the majority, not as a lingua franca, but as a symbol of a kind of cultural recruitment. The novelty of this development is underlined by the fact that it happened in British India, but not in the highly similar Dutch East Indies. Both the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie and the English East India Company had brought a Germanic language to a long-standing commercial market in South Asia; both had succeeded in displacing European competitors, the Portuguese or the French; both had attracted Protestant missionary camp-followers who were keen to spread their spiritual world-view to the local population. But the Dutch were content always to use the local lingua franca, Malay, as the language for their religion, and their administration. The mijnheers’ own world was separate from that of their local suppliers, employees and (ultimately) subjects, and so it would remain. (See Chapter 11, ‘Dutch interlopers’, p. 395.) Only the British provided the means to switch to their own language, English. When they did this, they were yielding certainly to pressure from their own missionaries, but also from their home population and many elite Indians. The emerging new attitude to the colony demanded nothing less, seeing it not just as a place in which to make a profit, but as British India, to be developed as a part of Greater Britain.

这一举措最终为英语成为世界语言铺平了道路，任何想要参与工业革命的人，无论身处何地，都可以使用英语。当时的动机或许可以让人想起洛伦扎纳大主教在十八世纪的呼吁，他主张在整个西班牙帝国推广西班牙语，尤其将其视为教育印度人的责任。（参见第十章“国家的解决之道：西班牙语化”，第373页。）但他实际上是在呼吁强制推行西班牙语，而非默认接受；最终，西班牙语的使用也确实如此，这主要是由于对其他语言教育的忽视。英语在印度的推广确实象征性地减少了政府对梵语和阿拉伯语的支持；而随后英语的普遍使用也导致了英语使用者在面对外语时的思维封闭。（“毕竟，他们都说英语，不是吗？”）但这种最终遍及全球的语言传播，通过我们所说的再教育，从来都不是强加的；英语仍然是少数人的语言，即使在印度民族主义者中，学习英语也更像是一种机遇的出现。这是语言传播史上一个崭新而重要的发展，后来至少还有一个强国——法国——将其作为一项刻意推行的政策，用于其帝国“文明使命”（mission civilisatrice）。（参见第十一章“第二帝国”，第416页。）

This step turned out to open the way to English as a world language, available to any who wanted to take part in the Industrial Revolution, wherever they might live. The motives at the time may recall those of Archbishop Lorenzana, calling in the eighteenth century for the use of Spanish throughout Spain’s empire, not least as a duty to the education of the Indians. (See Chapter 10, ‘The state’s solution: Hispanización’, p. 373.) But he was really calling for the use of Spanish to be imposed, not conceded; and so it ultimately was, largely through neglect of education in other languages. The case of English in India did involve some symbolic withdrawal of government support for Sanskrit and Arabic; and the generalised use of English which followed has contributed to the closing of English-speaking minds, where foreign languages are concerned. (’After all, they all speak English, don’t they?’) But this spread of the language, ultimately worldwide, through what we have called re-education, was never an imposition; English remained the language of a small minority, and even among Indian nationalists its acquisition felt more like the development of an opportunity. It was a new and significant development in the history of language spread, and was later taken up as a deliberate policy by at least one other power, the French, in their empire’s conceived mission civilisatrice. (See Chapter 11, ‘The second empire’, p. 416.)

过去五百年间，尤其是近两百年间，语言领域另一项重要的创新是技术作用的日益增强。文明本质上是由技术驱动的；事实上，根据一种定义，文明就是一系列技术创新的独特积累。语言的传播此前也曾受益于技术：回想一下，阿卡德语如何以楔形文字的形式记录在泥板上，使其成为古代西亚的外交通用语（参见第三章“阿卡德语——世界领先的技术：识字能力的典范”，第58页）；腓尼基人发明的字母系统不仅为亚述和巴比伦的阿拉米语使用者提供了担任文士这一新的精英角色，而且最终也为从冰岛到东印度群岛的全球行政和教育奠定了基础。

Another important innovation in language spread over the past five hundred years, and especially the last two hundred, was the growing role of technology. Civilisations are, by their nature, technology-driven; indeed, by one definition a civilisation is just a distinctive accumulation of technical innovations. And the spread of language had been advanced by technology before: recall how Akkadian’s availability in cuneiform writing on clay made it the diplomatic lingua franca of ancient West Asia (see Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 58), and how the alphabetic system invented by Phoenicians had provided the basis not just for a new elite role for Aramaic speakers as scribes in Assyria and Babylon, but in the end for administration and education throughout the world from Iceland to the East Indies.

但在现代，语言的传播主要得益于语言文本的大规模生产，以及后来能够瞬间跨越任何距离传播这些文本的手段。首先是印刷术，它早在十五世纪就已在欧洲兴起。印刷术在西欧接触众多未知语言以及传播自身语言的过程中发挥了至关重要的作用。^*四百年后，电子连接出现，最初是点对点传输，后来发展到广播。这些连接对语言传播产生了深远的影响。语言社群即使在地理上的分隔下也能持续存在。† 这或许会对语言本身的发展产生影响——尽管这种影响目前尚不明确：如果电子技术得到全面普及，它不仅可能导致广为流传的“距离的消亡”，甚至可能导致“方言的消亡”。但它已经产生了间接的影响。二战后四分之一世纪，欧洲列强，特别是从非洲的撤离，首先是对一种新的全球政治趋势——“变革之风”——的政策回应。英国首相哈罗德·麦克米伦在1960年曾精辟地指出：“变革之风正席卷整个非洲大陆。无论我们是否愿意，民族意识的觉醒都是一个不争的政治事实。” ^³

But in the modern era language spread has been effected above all by mass production of language texts, and later the means to disseminate them instantly over any distance. First came printing, already starting up in Europe in the fifteenth century. It played a cardinal role in western Europe’s encounter with many unknown languages, as well as in spreading its own.^* Then, four hundred years later, came electronic links, first point-to-point and then broadcast. The effects on language spread have been profound. Language communities have become sustainable despite physical separation.† This may have an effect—as yet unknown—on the development of the languages themselves: electronic technology, if it becomes totally pervasive, might even bring about not only the widely announced ‘death of distance’ but even ‘the death of dialect’. But it has had indirect effects already. The withdrawal of the European imperial powers in the quarter-century after the Second World War, especially from Africa, was above all a policy response to a new globally sensed politics, the ‘Wind of Change’ famously detected by the British prime minister Harold Macmillan in 1960: ‘The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.’³

外国精英们正在撤离，以尊重世界广大民众的声音，其中包括他们所统治的人民。而这些人民的声音，如今却通过这些精英们自己的媒体传播开来，甚至用他们自己的语言表达出来。

The foreign elites were departing, in deference to the voices of the world’s many, among them the people they governed. Those voices had become audible through those same elites’ own mass media, indeed now speaking in their own languages.

干得好

Way to go

我们能够延续两百年，一定做对了什么。

We must be doing something right to last two hundred years.

亨利·吉布森，歌曲名为《200年》⁴

Henry Gibson, song entitled ‘200 Years’⁴

我们尚未考虑英语的未来会如何。

We have yet to consider what future may await English.

过去四百年对英语民族而言几乎是不可思议的辉煌时期，政治、军事和文化上的胜利接踵而至。英语社群从英国向海外扩张，最初是悄然潜入狭小的缝隙，随后是帝国主义对越来越广阔领土的扩张，最终，在彻底的殖民主义消亡之后，在世界市场上获得了显著的认可。英语首先是人类社会能力的产物，它使不同群体在同一片土地上创造了一种语言；其次，这个岛国社群发现了利用其海军力量将公民和政治影响力传播到世界各地薄弱环节的能力；最后，当欧洲、北美乃至全世界发现如何从化石燃料、科学和大众市场中获利时，英语成为最容易获取的语言。这一连串的幸运积累了巨大的声望，这体现在全球对英语流行文化的热情上。正如五百年前的法语所展现的那样，与财富和权力联系在一起具有极强的吸引力。

The past four hundred years have been almost absurdly affirming for the English-speaking peoples, as political, military and cultural victories have succeeded one another. The language community has expanded overseas from England, first by stealth in tiny crevices, then by imperial assertion over ever vaster domains, and finally, after the demise of arrant colonialism, to apparent acclaim in a single world marketplace. It is a creature first of the human social faculty for creating a language among disparate groups who share a single territory, then the ability discovered by that one island community to use its naval strength to spread its citizens and its political influence wherever it found points of weakness all over the world, and most recently of being the language most readily to hand when Europe, North America and then the world discovered how to profit from fossil fuels, science and mass markets. This tremendous run of luck has created an enormous reserve of prestige, reflected in the global enthusiasm for English-language popular culture. As the French language showed five hundred years ago, association with wealth and power is highly attractive.

但英语很难指望它的语言霸主地位会永远持续下去。全球范围内单一语言的存在具有稳定作用，使其看起来几乎像是世界秩序中一个中立的部分，既不受大国控制，也不受任何单一社会控制。同样，拉丁语在西罗马帝国灭亡后延续了近千年，至少在西欧漫长的独立发展过程中，它让西欧有充分的理由相信，它已经成为思想和现实的永恒纯粹语言。但印刷术、远洋航行和全球帝国的崛起改变了这一切。世界依然是一个瞬息万变的地方。对于语言而言，就像对于任何人类机构一样，当你处于巅峰时，迟早会面临一条路要走。

But English can hardly expect that its linguistic vogue will continue for ever. The presence of a single language for communication worldwide is stabilising, giving it the appearance almost of being a neutral part of the world order, as much beyond the control of great powers as it is of any one society. Likewise the Latin language, lasting almost a millennium after the demise of the Roman empire in the west, gave western Europe at least, in its long separate development, good reason to believe that it had become the permanent and pure language of thought and reality. But the printing press, longdistance navigation and the rise of global empires changed all that. The world remains a highly dynamic place. For languages, as for any human institution, when you are on top, sooner or later there is only one way to go.

英语目前的地位主要由三大支柱支撑：人口、地位和声望。

The current status of English has three main pillars that support it: population, position and prestige.

首先，英语的使用人数与其他任何语言一样多。如果将3.75亿母语使用者、数量相当的第二语言使用者以及在学校或其他场合学习过英语的7.5亿人加起来，可以说全球四分之一的人口都熟悉英语。唯一能与之媲美的语言是汉语，前提是将所有接受过普通话教育的人加起来；但英语使用者的平均收入、社会地位和全球分布都使英语遥遥领先。在中国，英语是学校的必修科目；相比之下，汉语在所有英语国家的学校课程中都未被列入。

First of all, English has as many speakers as any other language. When its 375 million native speakers are added to the equal number of second-language speakers and the three-quarters of a billion people who have learnt it at school or in other classes, it is reasonable to claim that a quarter of mankind is familiar with English. The only comparable language is Chinese, when all those educated in Mandarin are added together; but the average income, status and global location of the English speakers give English very much the edge. Learning English is a majority school subject in the People’s Republic of China; Chinese, by contrast, remains off the syllabus in all English-speaking countries’ schools.

其次，如今没有任何一种语言的全球覆盖范围能与英语匹敌。英语在各大洲的国家都享有特殊的地位，这种地位只有法语可以与之媲美。然而，以英语为母语或第二语言的人数是法语使用者的四倍。英语使用者的自满情绪不言而喻：尽管英语使用者在商业和科学成就的各项指标上仍然占据主导地位，但在所有英语国家，完成义务教育的人通常只会说英语。绝大多数掌握了现代文明技术基础的人，仍然无法有效掌握任何外语。而且，这种情况将伴随他们一生。但这不仅仅是大多数英语使用者自满的问题。更重要的是，世界至今尚未为此付出任何代价；恰恰相反，世界似乎在奖励英语使用者坚守自身传统和智慧源泉。

Second, there is now no language to match English for global coverage. English has a special status in countries on every continent, a status it shares only with French. But there are four first- or second-language speakers of English for every one of French. The complacency of English speakers speaks for itself: while English speakers still predominate in all measures of commercial and scientific achievement, it remains the norm in every English-speaking country for those completing compulsory education to be monolingual in English. Effective competence in any foreign language continues to elude the vast majority of those who are made competent in the technical basis of modern civilisation. And this is how they stay throughout their lives. But it is not just that the majority of English speakers are complacent. It is more that the world has as yet exacted no price for this; if anything, it has rewarded English speakers for not swerving from their own traditions and sources of wisdom.

最后，英语在世界各地都与技术进步和流行文化有着不言而喻的联系。这种与英语相关的崇高声望似乎尤其有理有据，因为它并非基于某种精神启示——启示总是具有地域性，即便它们声称具有普遍性——也并非基于对某种能够保障自由或社会正义的特定政权的渴望。它基于对财富的认知，而财富可以通过科学进步及其理性应用而产生。鉴于这已成为当今世界所有最富裕国家近期的经验，从某种意义上说，它拥有客观真理的支持。

Finally, English is consciously associated with technical progress and popular culture in every part of the world. This kind of high prestige associated with the language seems particularly well founded because it is based not on a spiritual revelation—revelations are always local, even if they claim universal validity—nor on yearning for a particular regime, which would guarantee freedom or social justice. It is based on the perception of wealth, as it may be made to flow from scientific advance, and its rational application. Since this has been the recent experience of all the richest countries in the world today, in some sense it has objective truth on its side.

务实的人类往往目光短浅，因此“精明的投资者”（这本身就是一个典型的英国概念）自然而然地支持这样一种观点：英语近期的发展趋势，以及它目前的地位，将会无限期地持续下去。正如上世纪90年代的“思想家”们曾一度相信“历史的终结”，即自由主义和市场的最终胜利一样，如今也^有许多人认为，英语的发展可能已经跨越了世界通信发展史上的某个关键节点，永久地超越了任何可能的竞争对手，并为所有语言学习者提供了一条稳赚不赔的路。戴维·克里斯特尔是一位对现代世界语言有着深刻理解和敏锐洞察力的评论家；在他的著作《英语作为全球语言》的结尾，他回顾了可能危及英语地位的因素，特别是外国的负面反应、人口结构的变化以及方言分裂的可能性。但即便如此，他最终也只能推测，“英语或许会以某种形式永远服务于国际社会” ^。6

Practical human beings are notoriously short sighted, so the ‘smart money’ (itself a very English concept) is naturally backing the belief that the recent course of English, and hence its present status, will continue indefinitely. Just as the bien pensants of the 1990s could be brought to believe briefly in ‘The End of History’, the ultimate victory of liberalism and markets,⁵ so many today argue that the progress of English may have passed some key global point in the development of world communications, permanently outdistancing any possible competitor, and providing all language-learners with a one-way bet. David Crystal is a highly knowledgeable and perceptive commentator on languages in the modern world; and at the end of his book English as a Global Language he has reviewed the factors that might endanger its position, notably foreign negative reactions, the changing balance of populations, and the prospects of dialect fission. But even he can only speculate in the end that ‘it may be that English, in some shape or form, will find itself in the service of the world community for ever’.⁶

我们对五千年世界语言发展史的背景研究使这种前景显得不太可能。现代全球语言格局前所未有，但现代语言社群的组成人员仍然是人。而且，最重要的是，人们使用语言进行社交。人类社会一直以来都有语言繁衍的方式。

Our background study of five millennia of world language makes the eternity of this prospect seem unlikely. The modern global language situation is unprecedented, but the constituents of modern language communities are still people. And, above all, people use language to socialise. Human societies have always had a way of multiplying languages.

首先，世界上大多数人仍然是双语者；这表明，全球性语言很少能真正确立其作为第二语言的地位，它们在需要远距离交流的地区可以作为通用语，但并不足以成为人们日常生活的主要语言。主要的例外是拉丁语在西欧高卢语和伊比利亚语系中的自下而上的传播，以及汉语在东亚的传播。在这些地区，识字的语言社群在相邻区域扩散，而这些区域并不一定需要大量以英语为母语的移民。英语起源于一个岛屿，没有欧洲桥头堡，因此从未经历过这种连续的传播；如今，英语的主要传播方式是通过教育、电子媒体和书面交流，但这并不会使其取代人们的母语。^†

First of all, most people in the world are still bilingual; this points to the fact that global languages have seldom established themselves as anything more than second languages, useful as a lingua franca where long-distance communication is important, but not particularly commanding as vehicles for everyone’s daily life. The major exceptions to this have been the grass-roots spread of Latin over Gaulish and the Iberian languages in western Europe, and Chinese over East Asia, where literate language communities have spread over contiguous areas, without necessarily filling them up with native-speaker settlers. English, starting on an island and without a European bridgehead, never enjoyed this kind of contiguous spread; and its main mode of spread today, via education, the electronic media and literate contact, does not lead to it replacing home community languages.^†

其次，英语并非在所有地方都被视为通往财富和全球文化的中立媒介。一些政策制定者，尤其是在前英国或前美国殖民地，对英语“见惯不怪”，因此对其有所抵触，往往将历史渊源与国内权力政治结合起来。1948年，锡兰（今斯里兰卡）将英语排除在官方语言之外，部分原因是当时认为继续使用英语将有利于（主要为中产阶级的）泰米尔少数族裔；但随后的举措，包括1956年僧伽罗语被确立为唯一官方语言，并未带来令人满意的结果，英语的使用仍然十分普遍。1967年，坦桑尼亚和马来西亚取消了英语的官方语言地位；1974年，肯尼亚也取消了英语的官方语言地位；1987年，菲律宾将他加禄语提升至与英语同等的地位，“直至法律另有规定”。这种抵触情绪可能会随着殖民历史记忆的消逝而逐渐消失。⁷但美国在全球范围内的干预，有时甚至与其他英语国家结盟，在21世纪丝毫没有减弱的迹象。这将极大地巩固某些人对英语的固有印象，即英语是全球霸权国家的首选语言。

Second, English is not seen everywhere as a neutral medium of access to wealth and global culture. Some policy-makers, typically in ex-British or ex-American colonies, have ‘seen too much of it’, and resist it, often combining historic associations with domestic power politics. In 1948, Ceylon (now Śri Lanka) excluded English as an official language, partly because it was believed that its continued use would benefit the (predominantly middle-class) Tamil minority; the sequel, including the establishment of Sinhala as the only official language in 1956, has not been happy, and much use of English continues. In 1967, English was stripped of its status as an official language in Tanzania and Malaysia, and in 1974 in Kenya; in 1987, the Philippines promoted Tagalog to equal status with it, ‘until otherwise provided by the law’. This resistance may fade in later generations, along with memories of colonial history;⁷ but global interventions by the USA, sometimes in alliance with other English-speaking powers, show no sign of diminishing in the twenty-first century. They will do much to preserve an easy depiction of English in some quarters as the global bully’s language of choice.

最后，即便英语在全球范围内持续存在，也无法保证它作为一种语言能够保持统一。尽管公元三千年初期的世界与公元一千年初期的西欧截然不同，但英语很可能效仿拉丁语，在不同的方言区以不同的方式重塑自身，最终——比如在几个世纪之内——形成一个语系。在英语已成为通用语的地方，例如牙买加或新加坡，或者大部分人口都掌握双语，使得语码转换成为一种便捷的交流方式的地方，这种情况尤其可能发生，例如如今受过良好教育的印度人就经常使用语码转换。显然，如果英语社群保持定期的双向联系，例如通过电话、信件以及接收彼此的媒体信息，那么这种情况发生的可能性就会降低，或者至少会减缓。在世界主要语言中，英语或许仍然是通过相互交流来维护其统一性的最佳选择。例如，国际电话通话绝大多数都是用英语进行的。^但并非所有讲英语的社群都能充分参与全球对话；长期的裂痕和竞争可能会占据主导地位——就像西班牙和法国在文艺复兴时期的意大利争夺影响力一样，而就在一千年前，它们还都是同一个帝国的省份。

Lastly, even if English persists worldwide, there is no guarantee that it will stay united as a language. Although the world in the early third millennium AD is a very different place from western Europe in the early first, English could well follow the example of Latin, and reshape itself in different ways in different dialect areas, ultimately—say within a few centuries—becoming a language family. This is particularly likely wherever the language has established itself as a vernacular, as in Jamaica or Singapore, or where most of a population becomes bilingual, so that code-switching is an attractive mode of conversation, as for example it is today among educated Indians. Evidently this is less likely to happen, or will at least be slowed, if the communities that speak English stay in regular two-way touch, by phone and correspondence, and receiving each other’s media. English probably still holds the best position among large languages worldwide for preserving its unity by mutual contact. As one indication, international telephone traffic is overwhelmingly dominated by conversations in English.^* But not all English-speaking communities may play a full part in the global conversation; and long-term rifts and rivalries may come to dominate—as Spain and France contested for influence in Renaissance Italy, a mere millennium after they had all been provinces of a single empire.

我们可以设想英语命运转变的多种情景，并从过去许多强势语言的后期发展中汲取灵感。无论作为人口众多的第一语言，还是作为世界通用语，英语或许会发现其衰落的种子早已埋下。

It is possible to outline a variety of scenarios for a turn in the fortunes of English, drawing inspiration from the later years of many dominant languages of the past. Both as a first language of large populations, and as a world lingua franca, English may find that the seeds of its decline have already been planted.

作为第一语言，英语的人口使用量已经达到峰值。^*这一点与其他大多数欧洲帝国语言并无二致。英语的母语使用者人数仍在增长，但增速远低于其他一些主要语言。因此，据一项权威估计，到2050年，英语、印地语-乌尔都语、西班牙语和阿拉伯语的^使用人数将大致相当，而汉语的使用人数仍将是它们的2.5倍。届时，世界人口预计将趋于稳定，但不同语言过去人口增长率的差异将导致不同语言使用者的平均年龄出现巨大差异。英语和汉语将主要成为老年人的语言，阿拉伯语则主要成为年轻人的语言，而西班牙语和印地语-乌尔都语则介于两者之间。这并非预测不同群体的平均财富，因为财富可能是影响他们之间权力关系演变的重要因素，而且——正如我们在法语和英语的发展历程中所看到的——财富也决定了这些语言对外界的吸引力。英语或许仍是全球使用最广泛的语言，其使用者的平均收入也最高；但至少就母语使用者数量而言，它将不再拥有目前的领先优势。如果英语国家的经济体活力下降，语言领导地位也完全有可能发生变化。

As a first language, English has already peaked demographically.^* In this it is no different from most of the other imperial languages from Europe. Its native speakers are still growing in numbers, but at a far slower rate than those of some other major languages. As a result, according to one intelligent estimate,⁸ English, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish and Arabic should just about be on a par in the year 2050, with Chinese still exceeding each of them by a factor of 2.5. This is a time when world population is predicted to level off, but the heritage of the different past growth rates will be a massive difference among the average ages of the speakers of the various languages. English and Chinese will then be predominantly languages of older people, Arabic of the young, with Spanish and Hindi-Urdu somewhere in between. This is not to predict the average wealth of the different communities, which may be an important determinant of the evolving power relations among them, and also—as we have seen in the careers of French and English—of the attractiveness of their languages to outsiders. English may still have the greatest global spread of a language, and its speakers even the highest average income; but it will no longer have its current positional advantage, at least as to numbers of native speakers. If the English-speaking economies come to seem less dynamic, it is entirely possible that linguistic leadership too will shift away.

即使在母语人口众多的国家，英语也可能越来越需要适应其他大型语言群体的存在——在美国可能是西班牙语，在英国或许是某些主要的南亚语言，而在加拿大，一如既往地是法语，但也可能包括因纽特语。英语的不同变体将面临截然不同的地域性压力；双语现象可能会变得普遍，方言之间也可能逐渐分化。就像公元前一千年印度的雅利安语一样，它分化成俗语，最终演变成独立的语言，而梵语则作为通用语得以保存；又或者像公元一千年欧洲拉丁语的命运一样，英语也可能在母语使用者之间分裂成各种地方版本，而世界则继续使用一种通用版本作为通用语。

And even in the big native-speaker countries, the language may increasingly have to accommodate the presence of other large language communities—in the USA Spanish, in the UK perhaps some of the major southern Asian languages, and in Canada, as ever, French, but perhaps also Inuktitut. The different varieties of English will be under very different local pressures; bilingualism with different languages may become significant, and the dialects may progressively move apart. Like the Aryan language of India in the first millennium BC, diversifying into Prakrits and then separate languages, even while Sanskrit was preserved as an interlingua, or like the fate of Latin in Europe in the first millennium AD, English could find itself splitting into a variety of local versions among native speakers, while the world goes on using a common version as a lingua franca.

但即便作为通用语，英语也难逃困境。例如，粟特语，从公元8世纪到15世纪，是丝绸之路上从中国到撒马尔罕的商人和传教士的通用语言；又如腓尼基语，公元前一千年整个地中海地区的商业行话，也是识字传播的重要力量。如今，这两种语言都已不复存在。与商业相关的语言，一旦贸易的基础或财富来源发生变化，就会很快被弃用；众所周知，商人向来冷酷无情。指望世界财富分配的极端不平衡会无限期地继续向英语国家倾斜，实在是不切实际。总有一天，贸易条件会截然不同，而那一天到来之后不久，英语的地位就会显得格格不入，成为一个极其古老的异类。

But as a lingua franca too, English could still face difficulties. Witness the fate of Sogdian, from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries AD the merchant and missionary language of the Silk Road from China to Samarkand; or the fate of Phoenician, the mercantile jargon of the whole Mediterranean throughout the first millennium BC, and eminent spreader of literacy. Both are today nonexistent. A language associated with business is soon abandoned when the basis of trade, or the sources of wealth, move on; businessmen are notoriously unsentimental. And it is hardly rational to expect that the extreme imbalance in the world’s distribution of wealth is going to continue in the anglophone favour indefinitely into the future. One day, the terms of trade will be very different, and soon after that day comes, the position of English will seem a highly archaic anomaly.

同样，英语与世界科学的联系也未必能挽救它。无论教育普及程度如何，客观冷静的探究活动从来都不是大多数人所乐见的。严肃的研究始终是少数人的活动，由于其客观性，它总是需要那些已经积累了权力或财富的人的资助。但是，这些政治、军事、商业或宗教精英不可信赖，尤其当研究结果似乎不利于他们的权力，或者无法巩固他们的权力时：他们往往会偏袒传统或大众的无知。人们很容易忘记，科学的持续流行在很大程度上依赖于它不断提供新的“金蛋”或“金弹”。当这些“金蛋”的供应减少时（这种情况终有一天会发生），科学研究将被其出资者——工业界和政府——普遍视为一种昂贵的消遣。

Likewise the association of English with world science may fail to save it. Dispassionate enquiry has never been an activity that appeals to a majority, however widely education is made available. Serious research remains a minority activity, which because it is disinterested will always need patronage from others who have accumulated power or wealth. But those political, military, business or religious elites cannot be trusted, especially if it seems that the results of enquiry are telling against their own power, or failing to buttress it: they will then often adjudicate in favour of tradition, or popular ignorance. It is easy to forget how much the ongoing popularity of science depends on its continuing to offer new golden eggs, or new golden bombs. When the flow of goodies slackens, as one day it may, the pursuit of science will be widely seen as an expensive indulgence by its paymasters, in industry and government.

同样，当大众拥有市场力量时——就像他们在宗教改革时期的印刷革命中那样，也像如今在英语世界经常发生的那样——他们会利用金钱去索取他们能够理解并认为自己需要的东西。这就是市场的运作方式。但他们的判断会深受传统的影响。我们已经可以看到，在英语世界最富裕、技术最发达的国家，神创论以及对基督教某些古代经典的解读方式正在蓬勃发展。如果美国——如今是世界信息和知识最丰富的来源国——的权力开始打压那些思想自由的人，那么我们可以想象，世界其他地区也会开始用自己的语言来保护他们的知识。

In the same way, when the many themselves enjoy market power, as they did to some extent in the print revolution of the Reformation, and as they often do now in the anglophone world, they will use their money to demand what they can understand, and think they need. That is the way of markets. But their judgement will be heavily coloured by tradition. We can already see creationism, and an oracular approach to some of Christianity’s ancient texts, flourishing at the heart of the richest, and most technically developed, country in the English-speaking world. If powers within the USA, now the provider of the world’s greatest sources of information and learning, were to start to bear down on its freer thinkers, one could imagine other parts of the world beginning to guard their own learning behind the cloak of their own languages.

事实上，即使就其自身而言，学术传统在维持真正开放的心态方面也表现得相当糟糕；人们总是忍不住诉诸权威和公认的“常规科学”准则：想想看，公元三四世纪希腊的怀疑论（sképsis）和神学（ theōría）是如何演变为后来的语言保守主义和经院哲学的；想想看，梵语语法和佛教逻辑背后活跃的辩论是如何在中世纪的印度停滞不前，最终走向衰落；想想看，阿拔斯王朝时期阿拉伯语研究的黄金时代是如何随着十二世纪阿威罗伊的去世而走向终结的。世界科学界完全有可能陷入至少暂时的低迷；如果全球科学交流受阻，英语也将遭受损失。拉丁语的第二次衰落生动地展现了这种现象如何在国际范围内发生，而且确实发生过。

In fact, academic traditions too have a fairly poor record, even on their own account, for sustaining interest in genuine open-mindedness; there is always the temptation to appeal to authority, and the accepted canon of ‘normal science’: recall how the sképsis and theōría of third- and fourth-century Greece hardened into later linguistic conservatism and scholasticism, how the lively disputations underlying Sanskrit grammar and Buddhist logic congealed and ceased to develop in medieval India, and how the Abbasid golden age of research in Arabic petered out with Averroes in the twelfth century. There is plenty of scope for the worldwide scientific community to go into at least a temporary eclipse; and if global scientific exchange falters, English too will lose out. The second death of Latin shows vividly how such a thing can, and did, happen on an international scale.

世界文明的新中心正在崛起，它们拥有不同的语言背景。在东亚和东南亚，汉语社群日益展现出卓越的投资能力，并且似乎最终有望与迅速发展的中华人民共和国中的华人携手合作。（参见第四章“对外关系”，第161页。）在中东，阿拉伯语族群人口不断增长，并逐渐形成一定的团结意识，他们是全球穆斯林社群（乌玛）的一部分，因共同信奉伊斯兰教而紧密相连。激进伊斯兰主义者的激进行动，以及石油收入在其经济中占据主导地位所造成的收入和权力不平等，可能会阻碍他们真正融入主流社会。但最终，我们很难怀疑，这个庞大且具有高度自我意识的群体，拥有共同的信仰和语言，并且越来越能够通过现代媒体在各个层面进行沟通，即使没有来自该地区主要国家的政治领导，他们也终将团结一致，携手共进。

There are already new potential centres of world civilisation growing, with different language backgrounds. In East and South-East Asia, Chinese-language communities are increasingly apparent as masters of investment, and look likely at last to work in concert with their fellow Chinese in the rapidly developing People’s Republic. (See Chapter 4, ‘Foreign relations’, p. 161.) In the Middle East, Arabic-speaking peoples are growing in numbers with some sense of solidarity, part of the global ummah bound together by acceptance of Islam. The militant actions of radical Islamists, and the inequities of income and power caused by the dominance of oil revenues in their economies, may slow their real integration. But ultimately it is hard to doubt that this very large and self-conscious group, sharing a faith and a language, and increasingly able to communicate at all levels through modern media, will make common cause, even without political leadership from one of the main states of the region.

此外，我们还可以注意到，世界上1.47亿土耳其语人口中，有三分之二（主要是土耳其人、乌兹别克人、土库曼人、哈萨克人和吉尔吉斯人）自俄罗斯进军中亚以来，首次摆脱了外国人的控制，独立组织起来。^*作为一个整体，他们的人口数量超过了德语、法语或日语使用者的总和。随着沟通的改善，他们将开始将自己视为一个整体，因为他们的大多数语言都能相互理解。

Less prominently, too, we can note that two-thirds of the world’s 147 million Turkish-speaking peoples, notably Turks, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, are now organised independently of foreigners for the first time since the Russian advance into central Asia.^* As a total community, there are more of them than there are speakers of any of German, French or Japanese. With better communications, they will begin to consider themselves a unit, for most of their languages are mutually intelligible.

此类重组不会立即威胁到英语的全球使用，甚至在初期也不会显著削弱英语的使用。但它们可能预示着全球交流中使用的语言平衡正开始朝着不同的方向转变。

Such reorganisations will not immediately threaten, or even at first significantly diminish, the global use of English. But they may offer early signs that the equilibrium of languages used in global communication is beginning to shift in a different direction.

预见汉语或阿拉伯语将成为主要的国际语言无需任何想象：这源于对当前人口趋势的推断，并结合众所周知的经济和政治事实。但实际上，世界语言的未来发展很可能包含一些令人意想不到的新变化，从而改变人口格局。谁又能预料到，18世纪90年代巴西发现黄金会突然促使当地涌入大量葡萄牙语使用者？要知道，葡萄牙此前已统治这片土地三个世纪之久，却并未对当地语言产生显著影响。有时，一个单一事件就足以激发一种长期存在却从未实现的潜力。

To foresee Chinese or Arabic as major international languages requires no imagination: it follows from extrapolation of current population trends, in combination with well-known economic and political facts. But in reality, the future language history of the world will quite likely involve surprising new developments that alter population balances. Who could have foreseen that discovery of gold in Brazil in the 1790s would suddenly spur that place to fill up with Portuguese speakers, when Portugal had already held the land for three centuries without any great linguistic effect? Sometimes a single event is enough to trigger a potential that has long been possible, but remained unrealised.

即便在十一世纪，又有谁能预料到，造纸术（十二世纪）、火药（十四世纪）和印刷术（十五世纪）传入欧洲后，会先在宗教改革中彻底改变其宗教生活，随后又驱使欧洲的冒险家们远赴他乡，在非基督教世界定居并最终统治其他地区？这三项技术在中国早在公元一千年之初就已存在，却并未在其原产地产生任何显著影响。由此可见，即使在封闭的体系中，新的互动也能带来革命性的后果。

And who, even in the eleventh century, could have foreseen that the import into Europe of paper-making (twelfth century), gunpowder (fourteenth century) and printing (fifteenth century) would have first revolutionised its religious life in the Reformation, and then sent its adventurers out to settle, and to dominate others all over the non-Christian world? These three were all imports of techniques that had been known in China since the early first millennium, without any noted effect in their homeland. So even in a closed system, new interactions can have revolutionary consequences.

一些目前无法预见的重大事件和互动，也将扰乱并重塑未来；这一点似乎毋庸置疑。最容易预测——但我希望并非绝对确定——的是某种军事浩劫，而如今这种浩劫在技术上似乎太容易发生了。这可能会深刻地改变世界人口的平衡，正如盎格鲁-撒克逊人征服北美后，迅速导致所有本土语言的灭绝或濒临灭绝一样。流行病也可能产生巨大的平衡颠覆效应——就像欧洲人到来时美洲各地发生的那样，或许也像凯尔特不列颠人和诺曼法语人入侵英国末期发生的那样——尤其是在已经存在双语现象的地区。一场真正可怕的流行病，即使只是局部性的，也很有可能永久性地改变马来西亚或加拿大的语言格局。

Major events and interactions, now unforeseen, will disrupt and reroute the future too; there seems little doubt of this. Most easily predictable—but not, I hope, certain—is some kind of military holocaust, something that is nowadays technically all too easy. This could profoundly alter the balance of populations in the world, as the Anglo-Saxon advance through North America led rapidly to the extinction or endangerment of all its indigenous languages. An epidemic too could have a massive balance-tipping effect—as everywhere in the Americas when Europeans came, but as perhaps also twice in Britain, during the twilight years of Celtic British and Norman French—especially in situations where there is pre-existing bilingualism. A truly horrific epidemic, even if localised, could well permanently alter the linguistic situation in Malaysia, or in Canada.

当然，并非所有意料之外的事件都会改变现状，并对英语造成不利影响。想想波斯皇帝大流士，他下令在其领土内推广使用阿拉姆语，尽管当时的阿拉姆语除了作为行政工具拥有非常深厚的历史背景外，并无其他优势。以此类推，一些务实的政府很可能会加速英语在世界上此前未曾使用英语的地区——例如波罗的海地区或中亚——的传播。事实上，类似的事情就发生在20世纪60年代，当时李光耀下令在以华语为主的新加坡殖民地推广英语。

Not every unforeseen event need change the status quo to the detriment of English, of course. Remember the Persian emperor Darius, who decreed the use of Aramaic throughout his realm, although it was then a foreign language with nothing to recommend it but a very strong background as a vehicle of administration. It is quite possible, on that analogy, that some pragmatic government might hasten the spread of English to a part of the world hitherto without it—in the Baltic, perhaps, or central Asia. Indeed, something like this happened when Lee Kwan Yew decreed English for the largely Chinese-speaking colony of Singapore in the 1960s.

无论发生什么，任何改变都可能对留守的英语使用者产生出乎意料的不安影响。三个世纪以来，英语的边界一直在不断扩展。典型的英语使用者或许会以他们的务实精神为傲，并乐于见到语言障碍的打破，以促进更广泛的理解和便捷的沟通。但是，当使用量要减少的语言是他们自己的母语时，他们必然会感到不适。1984年，约有8%的美国人口声称他们的第一语言不是英语。这足以促使一项立法计划在20世纪90年代初启动，旨在“在法律上承认英语为政府官方事务的语言”。9^目前，许多州的议会仍在就此议题进行持续的提案和呼吁，但尚未得出结论。我们尚待观察其他英语国家在也无法再轻易地认为英语沟通总是可行的情况下会作何反应。

Whatever happens, any changes that do occur may have a surprisingly disturbing effect on the English speakers who remain. For three centuries now, the bounds of the language have continually expanded. Typical speakers may pride themselves on their pragmatism, and welcome the breaking down of language barriers, in the interests of wider understanding and easy communication. But when the language whose use is to be reduced is their own, expect discomfort to be registered. In 1984, some 8 per cent of the US population professed a first language other than English. This was enough for a programme of legislation to get under way in the early 1990s, to ‘recognize English in law as the language of the official business of the Government’.⁹ There is now a continuing hubbub of proposal and appeal on the topic in many states’ assemblies, which remains inconclusive. We have yet to see how other English-speaking countries will react when they too can no longer easily assume that the option of communication in English is always open.

但是，没有任何法律或法令能够阻止语言衰落的趋势。

But no law and no decree anywhere has ever yet stemmed the ebbing of a language tide.

三个主题：自由、声望和学习能力

Three threads: Freedom, prestige and learnability

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann，darüber muss man schweigen。

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

不能说出口的事，就只能默默承受。

What one cannot speak of, one must pass over in silence.

路德维希·维特根斯坦《逻辑哲学论》

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus

自由

Freedom

在这段叙述中，我们时常会不由自主地想要谈论自由，这几乎是一种义务。许多语言传统都声称要用自由来表达，或者说，要捍卫自由。言论自由是人权宣言中的核心理念之一，在现代人权宣言中得到维护，但在实践中却始终充满争议。对许多文明而言，自由是赋予言语以主要意义的美德。然而最终，我们却几乎从未真正谈及自由。为什么？

At various points in this narrative, there has been a temptation, almost a duty, to speak of freedom. Many language traditions make a particular claim to speak with it, or for it. Freedom of speech is one of the cardinal ideals, upheld in the great modern statements of human rights, and endlessly controversial in practice. For many civilisations, freedom is the virtue that gives speaking its main purpose. Yet in the end, we have said next to nothing about it. Why?

自由是某些类型国家，特别是共和国，特别关注的问题。一些民族尤其将自由视为理想，例如希腊人、罗马人、威尼斯人、1789年法国大革命后的法国人、1688年“光荣革命”（确立议会凌驾于君主之上）后的英国人（尽管较为低调），以及美利坚合众国。尽管人们普遍认为希腊语中的“eleuthería”、“libertās”、“libertá”、“liberté ”和“freedom”是同义词，但对于何为自由，即使在这些秉承欧洲政治哲学一脉相承且高度自觉传统的政体中，也从未就何为自由达成广泛共识。^*自由是指摆脱外国统治、公民自治、不承认世袭权利，还是个人在宗教、居住地和谋生方式上的选择权？所有这些理想都提出了不同的方式，以保障言论自由不受限制。

Freedom is a particular concern of some kinds of states, particularly republics. Some peoples that have particularly exhibited freedom as an ideal are the Greeks, the Romans, the Venetians, the French after their Revolution in 1789, the British (though discreetly) after their ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688 which asserted the supremacy of Parliament over monarch, and the United States of America. But although it is generally agreed that eleuthería, libertās, libertá, liberté and freedom are translation equivalents, there has never been widespread agreement on what makes a person, a people or a state free—even in these polities, which are in a continuous, and very self-conscious, tradition of European political philosophy.^* Is it independence from foreign overlordship, civic self-governance, non-recognition of hereditary rights, or the right of personal choice over religion, location and means of support? All these ideals suggest different ways in which the right of choosing what to say should be exempt from restriction.

从我们的角度来看，尽管这些理想对许多人来说弥足珍贵，但它们对任何语言社群的生存和传播几乎没有产生任何实质性的影响。亚历山大及其继任者在黎凡特、埃及和波斯等地大肆传播的希腊语文化，以及罗马精英阶层所接受的希腊语文化，几乎没有民主，大多是对绝对统治者——即“巴西利”（basileĩis）——的效忠，这些统治者自称是马其顿和波斯国王以及埃及法老的合法继承人。当共和国的自由公民制度被置于一个拥有军队支持的家族的控制之下时，罗马仍然在其帝国境内推广拉丁语。在波旁王朝的绝对君主制统治下，法语成为欧洲文化首选的国际语言；法国大革命提出了“自由！平等！博爱！”的口号。这使得法国在军事上更具侵略性，但对英语的吸引力几乎没有影响；英语的流行度直到20世纪初才开始下降，那时距离法国复辟和第二次君主制垮台已过去很久。英国人和美国人如此珍视的政治自由——正是这些自由促使前者处决了一位君主并废黜了他的儿子，而后者则宣布彻底脱离英国独立——最终却与无情地漠视美国原住民根据条约明确享有的权利，以及使用武力从他国领土上建立全球帝国的做法完全兼容。即使是“自由贸易”也未能阻止大英帝国内部的特权，也未能阻止当今对国内生产商的持续巨额补贴。所有这些都丝毫没有减弱英语在世界各地的传播，无论是通过强行淘汰还是再教育。

From our perspective, the avocation of all these ideals, dear as they are to so many, has made little concrete difference to the survival and spread of any language community. Greek-language culture, as ostentatiously propagated round the Levant, Egypt and Persia by Alexander and his successors, and taken up by the Roman elite, involved little or no democracy, and mostly allegiance to absolute rulers—basileĩis—who declared themselves the legitimate successors of the kings of Macedon and Persia and the pharaohs of Egypt. Rome went on purveying Latin round its empire when the free, civic, institutions of the republic had been placed in thrall to a single family with army backing. French had become the preferred international language of European culture under the auspices of the Bourbons’ absolutist monarchy; the French Revolution projected the slogan ’Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité!’ and made France much more aggressive militarily, but it had little or no effect on the attractions of its language; its popularity began to falter only in the early twentieth century, long after the Restoration and the second fall of the French monarchy. The political freedoms so prized by Englishmen and Americans, which had brought the former to behead one monarch and depose his son, and then the latter to declare independence from the British state altogether, turned out to be quite compatible with a ruthless disregard for American First Nations’ rights as specifically granted by treaty, and the use of military force to build a global empire out of other peoples’ territories. Even ‘free trade’ turned out to be no bar to imperial preference within the British empire, or in our day to continuing massive subsidies to domestic producers. None of this in any way diminished the spread of the English language, whether by sweep-aside or re-education, all round the world.

在这些语言的现有分布区域，言论自由如今或许已成为现实，而不再仅仅是一个未实现的理想。但在它们数百年乃至数千年的发展历程中，无论以何种定义，自由始终都只是一句空洞的口号，或者充其量只是一种愿望。我们回顾这些语言的历史，更着重探讨的是，在这些语言中，生活究竟意味着什么。

Freedom of speech may now be a reality, not just an unfulfilled ideal, in all these languages’ current territories. But over the centuries and millennia of their development, freedom, under any definition, has never for very long been more than a hollow boast, or at best an aspiration. Our review of their histories has chosen to dwell rather on what life in these languages really meant.

声望

Prestige

声望与积极的联想有关：就语言而言，声望的根源在于与财富的联系（在欧洲尤其如此），但也与实用智慧、快乐和精神启迪联系在一起。

Prestige is about positive associations: in the case of languages, the roots of prestige are associations with wealth (in Europe, this above all), but also practical wisdom, enjoyment, and spiritual enlightenment.

法语在近代早期欧洲的吸引力源于法国经济带来的繁荣，如今英语的吸引力也大致如此。不知何故，人们觉得只要掌握这门语言，就能分享财富。然而，拉丁语在文艺复兴时期及其后，以及希腊语在罗马帝国鼎盛时期的声望，与其说是源于财富的丰厚，不如说是源于智慧——这或许本身就是一种积极的联想，因为只有在财富充裕的情况下，人们才能负担得起教育这种奢侈品。汉语和阿卡德语的吸引力也源于此：掌握这两种语言的书面表达能力需要十年甚至更长时间的学习，这种学习的难度之高极大地提升了它们的声望，也因此，它们才显得格外引人注目。

The attractions of French in early modern Europe stemmed from the abundance delivered by the French economy, and much the same is true of English today. Somehow, speakers feel that they can share in the wealth by accepting the language. But the prestige of Latin, in the years of the Renaissance and after, and of Greek, in the heyday of the Roman empire, came not so much from abundance of wealth as from wisdom—perhaps itself a result of positive associations, since it is only when wealth is in good supply that that luxury product, education, can also be afforded. This underlay the attraction of Chinese and Akkadian: the sheer inaccessibility of written competence in these languages, paid for through a decade or more of study, added greatly to their prestige, and hence curiously their attractiveness.

某些类型的知识也能带来更多财富：公元前五世纪的希腊智者就证明了这一点，他们让有说服力的演讲技巧以收费的方式流传下来；现代政府也出于同样的动机，将英语能力视为经济发展的途径。

And certain sorts of knowledge also offer greater access to wealth: the Greek sophists of the fifth century BC showed this, making the power of persuasive speech available at a fee; modern governments are buying into the same motive when they see competence in English as the road to economic development.

kaì toũto pleĩn ē muríōn est' áxion statērōn

hairoúmenon toùs hēttonas lógous épeita nikān

kaì toũto pleĩn ē muríōn est’ áxion statērōn

hairoúmenon toùs hēttonas lógous épeita nikān

而这比用较弱的论点去赢得胜利，价值超过10000个州。

And this is worth more than 10,000 staters to take the weaker argument and then win

阿里斯托芬，《云》，11. 1041-2（雅典，公元前423年）

Aristophanes, Clouds, 11. 1041-2 (Athens, 423 BC)

所有高雅语言都能带来一种特殊的乐趣，因为它们都拥有丰富的文学作品，而文学的首要目的就是为能够欣赏它的人带来愉悦。通常，知道并非人人都能感同身受，本身就是一种乐趣。这便是古典语言历经岁月的魅力所在：从公元前13世纪赫梯碑刻室中吟诵的阿卡德史诗，到17世纪印度引用的波斯诗歌，再到19世纪俄罗斯人阅读的法国小说。然而，在当今时代，英语这种高雅语言的魅力却有所逆转——这或许是文化全球化带来的副作用。英语，尤其是在美国娱乐业的推广下，似乎旨在传达其文化具有普世性，能够使人摆脱其他语言的传统和束缚。英语与自由之间所谓的特殊联系固然是其中的一部分，但正如我们刚才所论述的，这种联系很难作为严肃的政治论据来支撑。然而，如果你很富有，那么自由自在、不负责任就容易得多。

All prestige languages give access to a special enjoyment, because they all have extensive literatures, and the first purpose of literature is to give enjoyment to the people who can appreciate it. Usually, knowing that not many others can share the appreciation has been part of the pleasure. This has been a charm of classical languages down the ages, from the Akkadian epics recited in the Hittite tablet-house of the thirteenth century BC to the Persian poetry quoted in seventeenth-century India and the French novels read in nineteenth-century Russia. But in the present age the charm of the prestige language, English, is somewhat reversed—perhaps as a side effect of the first globalised market in culture. English, especially as the American entertainment industry promotes it, is meant to convey that its culture is universally accessible, that it gives a release from other languages’ traditions and restraints. The purported special link with freedom is part of this, but as we have just argued, this is hard to sustain as serious politics. All the same, if you are rich, it’s much easier to be free and irresponsible.

尽管英语如今被视为年轻自由人士——以及学者和富人——的语言，但归根结底，一种语言与深刻宗教真理的联系才能赢得最忠实的拥护者，并建立起可以延续数千年的声誉。这才是语言价值超越其与历史成就简单关联的唯一依据。希伯来语、梵语和阿拉伯语都蕴含着一种神秘的力量，这种力量超越了单纯的意义表达或说话者之间的信息交流。^*因此，即使它们从日常话语中消失，只要还有信徒敬畏和珍视它们，它们就永远不会被贬低为过时或无关紧要。

Despite the current vogue for English as the language of the young and free—-as well as the learned and the rich—ultimately the association of a language with profound religious truth gains the most loyal adherents, creating a reputation that may last for thousands of years. This is the only basis for a language to claim a value above simple association with some historic success. Hebrew, Sanskrit and Arabic all claim a mystic force which goes beyond the mere expression of meaning, or exchange of information among speakers.^* As such, they may vanish from everyday discourse, but can never be demeaned as old fashioned or irrelevant, as long as there are believers to revere and treasure them.

当然，语言的传播有时并不依赖于这些威望形式。武力也能发挥强大的作用，很难想象土耳其语传播到安纳托利亚、西班牙语传播到秘鲁、俄语传播到西伯利亚、日语传播到朝鲜，甚至英语传播到马萨诸塞州，会给人留下什么深刻的印象。这并非意味着征服者不会为自己的行为感到自豪；尤其是在文字出现之前的社会，他们可能会用文字和歌谣来歌颂自己的征服。这种英雄诗篇对本土文学来说是有益的，但不太可能吸引外来者，更不用说被征服者了。

Languages sometimes spread without any of these forms of prestige, of course. Brute military force can be powerful too, and it is difficult to see any charisma arising from the spread of Turkish to Anatolia, Spanish to Peru, Russian to Siberia, Japanese to Korea, or indeed English to Massachusetts. This is not to say that the conquerors will not have found their own behaviour impressive; especially in pre-literate societies, they may celebrate their conquests in word and song. Such heroic poetry is good for an indigenous literature, but it is unlikely to appeal to outsiders, let alone the conquered.

一般来说，所谓“威望语言”是指为了获得文化优势而学习的任何外语。苏美尔语、阿卡德语、汉语、梵语、希腊语、拉丁语、阿拉伯语、土耳其语、波斯语、意大利语、法语、德语和英语都曾在各自的时代被视为威望语言。但这种盛况不会永远持续下去。要成为一种威望语言，其母语使用者——或者他们留下的文字记录——必须具有某种魅力，从而吸引模仿者。这种影响力取决于接受者的文化发展水平，以及原语言本身的价值。随着潜在接受者财富、知识和自信的增长，以及他们开始脱颖而出，外来语言的吸引力就会减弱。因此，毫不奇怪，在19世纪，当英语使用者凭借自身的技术创新和全球帝国席卷世界，令古典语言的成就黯然失色时，拉丁语和希腊语的魅力逐渐消退。同样，法语，甚至新兴的德语，在自信满满的英语使用者面前也逐渐失去了吸引力。

A prestige language, in general, is any foreign language that is learned for cultural advantage. Sumerian, Akkadian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Italian, French, German and English have all been such languages in their time. But the time will not last for ever. To be a prestige language, its native speakers—or the written records they have left—must somehow impress, and so attract imitators. This impact will depend on the cultural development of the recipients, as well as the merits of the originals. As potential recipients grow in wealth, knowledge and self-confidence, and begin to distinguish themselves, the attraction of a foreign model will shrink. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the charms of what was available in Latin and Greek diminished in the nineteenth century while the speakers of English were taking the world by storm with their own technical innovations and a global empire that left the achievements of the classics in the shade. Likewise, the charms of French and even the recently developing German faded before the self-confident speakers of English.

是什么让一门语言易于学习？

What makes a language learnable

学习语言有三种不同的方法。

There are three different ways in which languages are learnt.

幼儿几乎毫不费力地就能从家人和哥哥姐姐那里学会各种母语。要做到这一点，必须有一个相对稳定的环境，孩子周围的大部分人都说这种语言。

Every native language is learnt by small children almost without effort, from their families and older siblings. For this to happen, there has to be a reasonably stable environment, where most of the community around the child speaks the given language.

如果周围人群没有共同的语言，即使没有共同的语言环境，人们仍然可以学习语言，但那将是一种全新的语言，它与成年人已知的所有语言都截然不同，而是一种基于基本原则重新构建的混合体。当一群孩子学习这样的语言时，就会形成克里奥尔语。如果学习者是年龄较大的成年人，他们寻求某种实际的通用沟通方式，那么最终形成的就是皮钦语。

If this is absent, so that the surrounding people do not share a common language, a language may still be learnt, but it will be a new formation, distinct from all the languages that the adults knew, a mixture of them reconstructed on first principles. When a group of children learn such a language, a creole comes into being. If the learners are older, adults looking for some common means of de facto communication, the result is a pidgin.

第三种可能性是，语言是通过有意识地学习和习得的，无论是通过日常接触，还是通过正规教育，例如在学校学习。这个过程并不依赖于幼儿大脑中活跃的语言习得能力；事实上，无论学习者年龄多大，都可以采用这种方法。在这种情况下，学习者必须已经掌握另一种语言，并在习得新语言的过程中——无论是显性地还是隐性地——运用这种语言。

The third possibility is that the language is consciously studied and learnt, either through daily exposure to it, or through formal instruction, perhaps at a school. This process does not depend on the native capacity for language-forming that is active in the minds of small children; in fact, it can be put into effect whatever the age of the learner. In this case, the learner must already speak another language, and use it—explicitly and implicitly—in acquiring the new one.

前两种方法与所学语言的结构没有任何关系。语言学家普遍认为，任何自然语言，无论其结构如何，任何正常的儿童都能学会——无论其祖籍或父母的语言背景如何。某些语音和语言结构可能需要更长时间才能掌握，但最终都会掌握。这几乎就是自然语言的定义。至于克里奥尔语的起源，这个问题尚存争议，但它们似乎都倾向于具有一种共同的结构，这种结构在语言形成过程中自然而然地出现。学习者用来构建克里奥尔语的组成语言的结构，对新语言的形成过程没有任何影响。

The first two ways are not in any way dependent on the structure of the languages being learnt. It is generally accepted by linguists that any natural language, of whatever structure, can be learnt by any normal child—regardless of the child’s ancestry or its parents’ own linguistic background. Some sounds, and some linguistic structures, may take longer to get implanted than others, but everything will come in time. This fact is almost the definition of what it is to be a natural language. As for the genesis of creoles, the matter is controversial, but it appears that they all tend to have a common structure, which emerges naturally as the language is formed. The structures of the contributing languages, from whose parts the learners are constructing the creole, have no effect on the structure of the new language as it comes together.

第三种情况常见于一种语言在陌生地域传播之时，但它可能对语言的演替产生一些有趣的后果。在这种情况下，语言学习者会在脑海中保留一些先前掌握的语言所形成的语言背景，即所谓的底层语言。这种底层语言可能会限制学习者能够成功掌握的语言类型。

The third case, which is common when a language is spreading in a territory new to it, may, however, have some interesting consequences for the possible succession of languages. In this case, learners of a language will retain in their minds some background formed by the language or languages they knew before, what is called the substrate. This substrate may impose a constraint on the kind of language that can then be successfully learnt.

这种限制可能有两种表现形式。它可能导致学习者受到旧有语言习惯的影响，创造出一种新的语言版本。例如，印度英语失去了其特有的双元音：英语中gate和boat的发音分别是[geyt]和[bewt]，而在印度则发音为[gēt]和[bōt]。同样，英语中以重音为节奏的语速也被更为均匀的、以音节为节奏的语速所取代。但更根本的是，这种限制可能成为学习者有效掌握新语言的主要障碍。二战后数十年间，尽管各方都竭尽全力培养下一代掌握英语技能，但日本英语教学（ELT）的普遍失败就是一个例证。

Such a constraint may be of two kinds. It may cause the learners to come up with a new version of the language, influenced by their old speech. English spoken in India has lost its characteristic diphthongs: the words gate and boat, [geyt] and [bewt] in England, are pronounced [gēt] and [bōt] in India. Likewise, the stress-timed tempo of English has been replaced by a more even, syllable-timed, pace. But more radically, the constraint may act as a major block on the learners ever gaining effective command of the new language. An example of this might be seen in the widespread failure of English Language Teaching (ELT) in Japan for several decades after the Second World War, despite Herculean efforts on all sides to give the next generation competence in this new skill.

认为语言的采用可能存在这种结构性限制的观点极具争议；在具体案例中很难证明这一点，因为总会有许多非语言因素阻碍语言的传播。但本书从几个世纪以来语言动态的角度出发，提出了一些新的论点，表明这种限制可能确实是一个限制某些语言在特定地区，或者更确切地说，在特定人群中传播的因素。

The idea that there might be this kind of structural constraint on the adoption of a language is highly controversial; it will be difficult to demonstrate in a particular case because there will always be a multitude of non-linguistic reasons which might be inhibiting take-up of the language. But the perspective of this book, where language dynamics have been surveyed over centuries, gives some new arguments to show that it may be a real factor limiting the spread of certain languages into certain territories, or rather among certain populations.

那么，请考虑一下阿拉伯语领域的奇怪倒退现象，在穆罕默德去世后大约三个世纪，阿拉伯语似乎从其在东西方的最远边界退缩了。（参见第三章“阿拉伯语——雄辩与平等：‘顺从’的胜利”，第93页。）阿拉伯语仅在先前使用亚非语系语言的地区永久定居下来，即在结构上与阿拉伯语本身接近的语言。首先，阿拉伯语占领了整个阿拉姆语世界，即今天的叙利亚和伊拉克。在这里，阿拉伯语几乎可以逐字逐句地取代阿拉姆语。随后，阿拉伯语迅速蔓延，并最终渗透到北非各国，这些国家的官方语言是埃及语（现在称为科普特语）和柏柏尔语，尽管在这些情况下，阿拉伯语的传播速度要慢得多，而且——至少就柏柏尔语而言——远未完全普及。但在法尔斯（波斯）和安达卢斯（西班牙南部），尽管它们早期以阿拉伯语学术中心而闻名，但阿拉伯语却被驱逐，仅在伊斯兰教的礼拜仪式中使用。这些国家恰恰是底层语言分别为印欧语系的波斯语和安达卢斯语的国家。西班牙语；或许对于一个使用印欧语系语言的民族来说，学习一种亚非语系语言并非易事。^*当然，下一个重要的语言传播者——土耳其人——并没有学习阿拉伯语，尽管他们接受了伊斯兰教，甚至将其传播到了欧洲。土耳其语在结构上与阿拉伯语的相似度甚至比印欧语系与阿拉伯语的相似度还要低。伊斯兰教在第二个千年继续传播到远东地区；但它再也没有将阿拉伯语带到清真寺之外的地方。

Consider, then, the curious retrenchment in the domain of Arabic, which seemed to roll back from its farthest limits in the east and the west, about three centuries after its first spread following the death of Muhammad. (See Chapter 3, ‘Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission”, p. 93.) It settled permanently only in the territories that had previously spoken an Afro-Asiatic language, i.e. one that was structurally close to Arabic itself. First of all, Arabic took over the whole of the Aramaic-speaking world, modern Syria and Iraq. Here Arabic could have replaced Aramaic almost word for word. It then overran quickly, and subsequently pervaded, the countries in North Africa, whose vernacular was Egyptian (now known as Coptic) and Berber, although in these cases the spread was far slower, and—at least in the case of Berber—is by no means complete. But in al-Fārs (Persia) and in el-Andalūs (southern Spain), despite their early reputation as centres of Arabic scholarship, the language was expelled, except in the liturgy of Islam. These are precisely the countries where the substrate language was Indo-European, respectively Persian and Spanish; perhaps it is not so easy for a population speaking an Indo-European language to pick up an Afro-Asiatic one.^* Certainly, the next major language spreaders to come through, the Turks, did not pick up Arabic, although they did accept, and even spread into Europe, the religion of Islam. The Turks’ language is even less similar structurally to Arabic than Indo-European is. Islam continued to spread in the second millennium, into the Far East; but never again did it carry Arabic with it outside the mosques.

公元前332-323年亚历山大征服之后，希腊语在西亚和埃及的发展程度不一。原则上，各地行政语言都从阿拉姆语转为希腊语，希腊人聚居地也遍布各地，至少在较大的城市中是如此；但希腊语真正普及的地区只有小亚细亚，也就是安纳托利亚半岛。（参见第六章“亚洲诸王：希腊语通过战争传播”，第247页及之后。）换句话说，希腊语在弗里吉亚语的旧领地（铭文表明弗里吉亚语与希腊语密切相关）以及吕底亚语和其他安纳托利亚语系语言（这些印欧语系语言的结构也与希腊语相当）最为成功。在叙利亚、巴勒斯坦和美索不达米亚（当地居民讲阿拉姆语）、埃及（当地居民讲阿拉姆语和埃及语）以及波斯（当地居民讲阿拉姆语和波斯语）等地，希腊语的传播并不成功，只有一些以希腊语为母语的社群得以保留。从结构上看，希腊语没有在波斯扎根是最令人惊讶的，因为波斯语是一种与希腊语非常相似的印欧语系语言（据说年迈的希腊人地米斯托克利在一年内就学会了希腊语——参见第 5 页普鲁塔克的引文）；但或许存在一些非语言学的原因，使得一种外来语言在曾经独立强大了两个多世纪的帝国腹地受到特别的憎恨和抵制。

Consider the varying success of Greek in western Asia and Egypt, after Alexander’s epochal conquests in 332-323 BC. In principle the administration was everywhere converted from Aramaic to Greek, and there were Greek settlements all over, at least within bigger cities; but Greek only became pervasive in Asia Minor, the great peninsula of Anatolia. (See Chapter 6, ‘Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war’, pp. 247ff.) In other words, Greek was most successful in the old domain of the Phrygian language in the centre (known from inscriptions to have been closely related to it), and of the Lydian and other Anatolian languages, Indo-European tongues whose structure was also fairly similar to Greek. Greek was unsuccessful, except in planted communities of native speakers, in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia (where people spoke Aramaic), in Egypt (where people spoke Aramaic and Egyptian), and in Persia (where people spoke Aramaic and Persian). It is most surprising structurally that Greek did not take root in Persia, since Persian is a fairly similar Indo-European language (and was famously learnt in a year by an ageing Greek Themistocles—see the Plutarch quote on p. 5); but perhaps there are non-linguistic reasons why an alien language should be particularly resented and so resisted in the heartland of what had been an independent and mighty empire for over two centuries.

第三个例子表明，语言结构似乎对一种语言的生命前景至关重要：自14世纪帖木儿率领蒙古人征服伊朗，以及更早的13世纪成吉思汗及其继任者征服伊朗以来，蒙古语几乎完全从中亚、西亚和欧洲消失。1240年攻陷基辅的金帐汗国是一支蒙古军队；甚至16世纪统治印度的巴布尔王朝也以“莫卧儿”（即莫卧儿或蒙古）之名而自豪，尽管如前所述，他的语言是突厥语。（参见第三章“第三个插曲：突厥语和波斯语，伊斯兰的先锋”，第106页。）蒙古人的入侵并没有很快被推翻或遏制：这些曾经辉煌的蒙古人后来都怎么样了呢？

A third example where language structure seems to have been crucial in the life prospects of a language is almost total absence of Mongolian from central and western Asia and from Europe, since the far-reaching conquests of the Mongols under Tamerlane across Iran in the fourteenth century, and previously under Genghis Khan and his successors in the thirteenth. The Golden Horde which sacked Kiev in 1240 was a Mongol army; and even Babur’s dynasty, which dominated India from the sixteenth century, rejoiced in the name ‘Mughal’, that is to say Mogul or Mongol, although his language, as we have seen, was Turkic. (See Chapter 3, “Third interlude: Turkic and Persian, outriders of Islam’, p. 106.) None of the Mongol invasions was soon undone or rolled back: what had happened to all these successful Mongolians?

蒙古人入侵的一个关键特征是，它们在很大程度上重演了突厥人（如匈奴人和可萨人）早期的征服。此外，这些入侵主要由突厥语系的战士组成。如今，突厥语和蒙古语虽然在基因上没有关联，但在结构上却高度相似。（参见第四章“北方影响”，第145页。）因此，对于一个说蒙古语的人来说，学习突厥语非常容易，可以说——而且无疑常常是字面意义上的——即兴发挥。在蒙古以外，蒙古人往往是少数族裔，因此他们的语言被突厥盟友的语言所淹没。

A crucial feature of the Mongol-led invasions was the fact that they largely recapitulated earlier conquests of Turks (such as Huns and Khazars). Furthermore, they were conducted predominantly with contingents of Turkic-speaking warriors. Now Turkic and Mongolian, even if they are not genetically related, have become highly similar to each other structurally. (See Chapter 4, ‘Northern influences’, p. 145.) It was very easy, therefore, for a Mongol speaker to pick up Turkic, so to speak—and no doubt often quite literally—on the trot. Outside Mongolia, Mongols tended to be in a minority, and so their language was submerged in the language of their Turkic allies.

第四个例子是一位研究罗马征服高卢的学者提出的。我们已经看到，这导致拉丁语迅速且出人意料地彻底地取代了高卢语。布里吉特·鲍尔提供的证据表明，拉丁语和高卢语在许多方面都非常相似。 ¹⁰这种相似性使得语言之间能够像我们刚才假设的那样，逐字逐句地相互替代，就像阿拉伯语取代阿拉姆语那样。相比之下，不列颠语的结构——或许仍然带有前凯尔特语底层语言的影响——则截然不同，它最显著的特点是动词位于句首：动词在句子中位于句首。对于不列颠人来说，学习用拉丁语表达自己比高卢人要困难得多，而这一顽固的事实或许正是今天法国使用罗曼语族语言而英国却不使用的原因所在。

A fourth example has been suggested by a student of the Roman takeover of Gaul. We have seen that this led to a rapid, and surprisingly thorough, spread of Latin in place of Gaulish. Brigitte Bauer presents evidence that Latin and Gaulish were in many respects highly similar languages.¹⁰ This similarity would have allowed the kind of word-for-word language replacement that we have just posited in the spread of Arabic over Aramaic. By contrast, the structure of British—still perhaps bearing the influence of a pre-Celtic substrate—was rather different, above all being a verb-initial language: verbs come first in the sentence. It would have been harder for Britons to learn to express themselves in Latin than it was for Gauls, and this stubborn fact may be at the root of why France today speaks a Romance language, but Great Britain does not.

总的来说，尽管语言学家两百多年来普遍认为语言结构至关重要，但在某些情况下，语言的本质——其结构——可能确实会影响其生存能力。我们认为，当一种语言的结构与新人群的旧语言相似时，新人群更容易学习这种语言，从而也更容易传播。在这个过程中，并没有特定的结构偏好，只是新旧语言的相似性才是关键。否则，学习一门新语言将是一项艰巨的任务，甚至对许多成年人来说都过于困难。

Overall, it seems that—despite the received wisdom of linguists over two centuries and more—there may be circumstances in which the very essence of a language, its structure, can play a role in its viability. Languages, we suggest, are more easily learnt by a new population, and hence spread more easily, when they are structurally similar to the old language of that population. No particular structure is preferred in this process, just similarity of new with old. Otherwise learning a new language is an uphill struggle, perhaps too difficult for many who are already grown.

比帝国还要广阔

Vaster than empires

如果说这本书揭示了什么，那就是世界语言并非仅仅是世界强权的产物。语言的形成并非源于权力的扩张，而是源于更广泛的人类共同体的构建。

If this book has shown one thing, it is that world languages are not exclusively the creatures of world powers. A language does not grow through the assertion of power, but through the creation of a larger human community.

显然，军事或经济实力可以成为促进社群发展的强大动力。罗马势不可挡的军队、西班牙的先锋队以及英国皇家海军都在各自的时代对拉丁语、西班牙语和英语的传播起到了至关重要的作用。然而，单纯的征服或商业发展未能促进语言传播的例子屡见不鲜，不容忽视：突厥人、蒙古人和满族人征服中国北方后取得的政治成功并未推动其语言的传播；日耳曼人入侵罗马帝国也未能取代甚至削弱拉丁语。荷兰在东南亚长达两个世纪的商业成功也未能使荷兰语本身受益。那些遍布全球的商人，如地中海的腓尼基人和丝绸之路上的粟特人，或许在传播商品的同时也传播了识字技能，但他们并没有促使他们的顾客更广泛地使用他们的语言。

Clearly, military or economic might can act as strong inducements to community growth. Rome’s irresistible armies, Spain’s adelantados and Britain’s Royal Navy have all played essential roles in the wider projection of Latin, Spanish and English in their eras. But failures of naked conquest or commercial development to cause linguistic spread have been too frequent to ignore: the political success of Turkic, Mongol and Manchu in mastering northern China did not extend their languages, nor did the Germanic invasions of the Roman empire dislodge or even reduce Latin. The Netherlands’ commercial success for two centuries in South-East Asia did nothing for Dutch. Those universal traders, the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean and the Sogdians up and down the Silk Road, may have spread literacy skills along with their merchandise; but they did not convert their customers to wider use of their languages.

军事征服或经济统治似乎只有在征服者人数压倒性地涌入的情况下才能传播一种语言，这种人数的增加要么是通过长期移民，要么是当地人口的崩溃。一种不那么残酷的替代方案是，征服者将被征服者纳入一个技术更发达、更有可能带来财富的文明体系中，就像罗马人在高卢和英国人在印度所做的那样。

It appears that military conquest or economic domination will usually spread a language only if the conquerors come in overwhelming numbers, either through long-term immigration or a collapse of the native population. A less brutal alternative is for the conquerors to enlist the conquered into what is clearly a more technically developed, and potentially enriching, civilisation, as the Romans did in Gaul, and the British in India.

但这只是语言传播这一根本要点的另一个方面，即语言传播依赖于社群的增长。梵语正是凭借这一点在东南亚传播了一千年之久而无需征服；克丘亚语是如何占领印加帝国的领土的；法语又是如何被欧洲东部的外国列强精英所接受的，他们只是想模仿自己所知的最高文化。阿拉姆语最初也是通过一个广泛分布的双语抄写员社群传播开来的，这些抄写员能够创作和解读用阿拉姆语书写的信息，即便当时使用阿拉姆语的社群正被从亚述帝国的各个角落驱逐并重新安置。除了暴力之外，还有更多、也更有效的方式来扩大社群。共同的语言使得越来越多的人能够参与其中。正如安德森所说：“语言最重要的特性之一在于它能够构建想象的共同体，从而有效地建立起特定的团结。毕竟，帝国语言仍然是方言，因此也是众多方言中的一种特殊方言。” ¹¹

But this is just another aspect of the fundamental point about language spread, namely that it depends on community growth. This is how Sanskrit was able to spread in South-East Asia for a millennium without a conquest, how Quechua took over the domains held by the Inca, and how French was taken up at the eastern end of Europe by the elite of foreign powers who simply wanted to imitate the highest culture they knew. Aramaic too was first spread through a widely scattered community of bilingual scribes capable of originating and interpreting messages written in it, even as communities that spoke it were being uprooted and resettled over the entire Assyrian empire. There are more ways, and indeed more effective ways, than violence by which to enlarge a community. A common language is what enables ever more members to participate in it. As Anderson puts it: ‘Much the most important thing about language is its capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities. After all, imperial languages are still vernaculars, and thus particular vernaculars among many.’¹¹

每个社群都有其独特的行事方式。每个社群都因其过往的传统而拥有各自的性格，而这些传统大多通过以本族语言流传下来的叙事和仪式来传承。与二十世纪西方哲学的大多数假设相反，语言绝非仅仅是“语言”。每种语言都有其独特的色彩和韵味。本书中，我们得以一窥不同传统的独特特征：阿拉伯语的庄严宏伟和人人平等；汉语和埃及语坚定不移的自尊；梵语繁复的分类和等级制度；希腊语自信的创新最终导致自恋和迂腐；拉丁语的公民意识；西班牙语的严谨、贪婪和忠诚；法语对理性的推崇；以及英语对商业智慧的推崇。这些丰富多样的特质有时可以在这些语言的文学作品中有所体现，但当它们被讲述为语言的历史时，这些特质便会跃然纸上。

Each community is differentiated with its own particular approach. Each is given its character by the traditions of its past, and many or most of them are conveyed by narratives and rituals shared in its own language. Contrary to the assumption of most twentieth-century Western philosophy, a language is never simply ‘language’. Each language has its own colour and flavour. In this book, we have glimpsed some of the distinctive traits of the various traditions: Arabic’s austere grandeur and egalitarianism; Chinese and Egyptian’s unshakeable self-regard; Sanskrit’s luxuriating classifications and hierarchies; Greek’s self-confident innovation leading to self-obsession and pedantry; Latin’s civic sense; Spanish rigidity, cupidity and fidelity; French admiration for rationality; and English admiration for business acumen. These manifold qualities can sometimes be seen in the languages’ literatures. But they leap out when the languages’ histories are told.

这本书讲述了一些语言如何迅速扩张，其传播范围往往以牺牲其他语言为代价，但其核心却是一个语言多样性的故事，这本身就是一个悖论。毕竟，本书所叙述的这类发展正是导致当今语言濒危危机的根源，其形势之严峻，以至于我们有理由相信，世界上一半语言的最后几位使用者可能已经去世。 ¹²但即便本书所讲述的十几种语言的故事，如今也占据了世界语言使用者总数的五分之二左右，世界上仍然有六千多种语言。

It is a paradox that this book, which has told the stories of languages that have so vastly extended their reach, often at the expense of others, is above all a tale of diversity. After all, the kinds of developments recounted here are what have led to the modern crisis of language endangerment, a situation so serious that it is reasonable to believe that, for half the world’s languages, their last speakers may already be alive today.¹² But there are still over six thousand languages in the world, even if the dozen or so whose tales have been told in this book now account for about two-fifths of the world’s speakers.

值得探讨的是，每种语言所代表的意识和身份的多样性在现代世界是否能够或应该继续存在。过去的工业革命和科学革命都声称，通往有效知识和工业组织的路径只有一条，并以一系列看似神奇的成就来证明这一点。然而，至少在19世纪中期之前，正是六种不同语言的研究互动才推动了知识的进步。即使在今天，一位对英语在现代世界中的作用有深刻洞察力的观察者也会指出：“500年后……如果英语成为唯一幸存的语言……那将是地球历史上最大的知识灾难。” ¹³

It is worth asking whether the diversity of consciousness and identity that each language represents can or should survive in the modern world. Past industrial and scientific revolutions argue that there is a single, unified path to valid knowledge and industrial organisation, and boast a display of seemingly magical achievements to prove it. Nevertheless, at least until the mid-nineteenth century it was the interplay of research in half a dozen different languages which kept up the pace of intellectual advance. And even today, a penetrating observer of the role of English in the modern world can remark: ‘in 500 years’ time…if [English] is by then the only language left…it will have been the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known’.¹³

但我们不应被即将到来的统一的预言所冲昏头脑。过去两千五百年间，至少有六种精神启示自诩为普世真理，而其中大多数至今仍存在争议。同样，本书所回顾的语言，其传播范围也已扩大了两倍于此的时间。尽管竞争如此激烈，但几乎所有这些语言——或其后继者——在二十一世纪初依然存在。

But we should not be too overwhelmed by forecasts of impending unity. Half a dozen spiritual revelations have offered themselves as universal truths in the past 2500 years, and most of them are still in contention. Likewise the languages whose histories this book has reviewed have been spreading in increasing circles for twice that period of time. Despite all this rampant competition, almost all of them—or their successors—are still in existence at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

通用语是一种便利：对于说话者来说，它能方便地将信息传递到世界各地；对于听者来说，当某个语言群体似乎拥有过多的有用知识时，通用语也同样方便。尽管有巴别塔的传说，以及将其解读为警世寓言的粗俗版本，但语言多样性并非人类的负担。世界上大多数人都会说多种语言，而且每个人都可以做到；除了缺乏时间和精力之外，没有人会被严格地排除在其他语言群体之外。不同的语言保护并滋养着不同文化的成长，在这些文化中，人们可以发现不同的知识路径。对于那些掌握多种语言的人来说，语言无疑丰富了他们的生活。

A lingua franca is a convenience: for speakers to convey a message across the world, certainly, but also for listeners when one language community appears to have more than its fair share of useful knowledge. But despite the myth of the Tower of Babel, and its vulgar interpretation as a cautionary tale, language diversity is not a liability for the human race. Most people in the world are multilingual, and everyone could be; no one is rigorously excluded from another’s language community except through lack of time or effort. Different languages protect and nourish the growth of different cultures, where different pathways of human knowledge can be discovered. They certainly make life richer for those who know more than one of them.

在撰写本书的过程中，我有意在语言学领域内探索一种全新的研究方法。我没有着眼于世界主要语言的现状，而是采取了历史视角。然而，我并没有像历史语言学家那样系统地比较不同语言的词汇，试图重构它们的过去；也没有像语言类型学家那样比较不同语言的整体结构；而是考察了每种语言在其漫长历史中的演变历程。书中所有比较，都体现在这些语言发展历程的比较上。这类研究或许可以称之为语言动力学研究。^*这是一种此前鲜有探索的理解人类社会的方法：语言，在其不断演变的各种形式中，不仅组织着人类的思维，也组织着构成社会的庞大群体，使人们能够交流互动、思考行动。

In writing this book, I have consciously been embarking on a new approach within the general field of linguistics. Instead of looking at the current status of the world’s major languages, I have taken a historical view. But instead of comparing words in different languages systematically, with a view to reconstructing their past, as a historical linguist usually does, or comparing the overall structures of different languages, like a language typologist, I have considered the evolving status of each language over the centuries of its career. Where any comparison has been attempted, it is the comparison of those careers. This kind of work might be called the study of language dynamics.^* It is an approach, previously little explored, to understanding human societies: how language, in all its evolving variety, organises not just the human mind but also the large groups of human minds that constitute themselves into societies, which communicate and interact, as well as think and act.

从这个角度来看，我们之所以关注大型语言，首先是出于便利。所有语言都有其自身的历史，但很少有语言的文献资料足够详尽，能够揭示其全貌。通常情况下，只有那些规模庞大且广为人知的语言才拥有最充分的文献资料。这正是我们需要着手的地方，我们需要勾勒出这个新领域的轮廓。而我们也确实做到了。但归根结底，语言动力学必须涵盖人类语言历史的方方面面，包括其多样性。

From this point of view, our focus on large languages has been above all a convenience. All languages have their own histories, but few are well enough documented to reveal very much about them. It is the large and famous languages that typically have the most adequate documentation. This is where we needed to start, to lay down the outlines of this new field. And this we have done. But ultimately language dynamics must encompass the history of human language in all its diversity.

kva sūryabhavo va sa kva cālpavi ;ayamati titīr urdustara mohād u upenasmi sāgaram

kva sūryabhavo vaśa kva cālpavi;ayā mati titīrur dustara mohād uupenāsmi sāgaram

这里是太阳诞生的血脉，而我却天资聪颖：我岂能愚蠢地划着独木舟横渡那无法逾越的海洋？

here the lineage born of the Sun, and here my weakly endowed mind: would I in folly cross the impassable ocean in my canoe?

迦梨陀娑，《罗睺之系》，第一卷第二章

Kālidāsa, The Line of Raghu, i.2

^*各地的情况都因大量第三方（主要是非洲黑人）被用作奴隶而变得更加复杂；在某种程度上，他们，或者他们与当地居民的混合体，

成为了一个新的少数族裔群体的代表，而移民则成为了多数族裔。但是，这个与奴隶制相关的少数族裔群体从未因语言而与多数族裔群体分离，因为他们自身也只是通过采用某种形式的奴隶主语言而成为了一个群体。

^* Everywhere the situation was complicated by the simultaneous surge in the use of third parties, mostly black Africans, as slaves; to an extent they, or a mix of them and the indigenous population,

became the representatives of a new minority community, with the immigrants now the majority. But this slave-associated minority was never divided by language from the majority community, since they had become a community themselves only by adopting some version of the slave-owners’ language.

^*鲜为人知的衍生结果是印刷书籍首次被用作语言教材，最初是拉丁语教材。这反过来又促成了传教语言学的发展，最初是为了帮助在异国他乡进行布道（Ostler：2004）。

^* A little-noted spin-off of this was the first use of printed books as language tutors, initially of Latin. This in turn led to the development of missionary linguistics, originally as an aid to preaching in exotic places (Ostler: 2004).

^†预计不久之后，小型语言社区以及本书所探讨的伟大语言都将从中受益。

^† This can be expected soon to benefit small language communities, as well as the great languages that have been the subject of this book.

^然而，家庭社区的性质正在发生变化，部分原因是英语的影响。女性受教育程度的提高，以及越来越多地学习英语，再加上广播和电视等家庭媒体的普及，意味着在家中学习第一语言的“母语”情境将越来越多地包含英语。

^* However, the nature of the home community is changing, partly under the influence of English. Rising levels of female education, more and more including English, and the prevalence of domestic media such as radio and television, mean that the ‘mother-tongue’ situation for learning a first language in the home will increasingly include English.

^* 1994 年使用最频繁的 48 条洲际电话线路中，46.9%（530 亿分钟）是英语使用者之间的通话。另有 50.4%（570 亿分钟）是英语使用者与其他语言国家之间的通话（数据来自 TeleGeography Inc.，引自 Graddol 1997: 37）。

^* Of the forty-eight most heavily used intercontinental flows of telephone calls in 1994, 46.9 per cent (53 billion minutes) were between English speakers. Another 50.4 percent (57 billion) were between English speakers and countries of other languages (figures from TeleGeography Inc., as cited in Graddol 1997: 37).

^*参见第 13 章，第 532 页。

^* See Chapter 13, p. 532.

^* 17%（主要是阿塞拜疆人）生活在伊朗；7%生活在中国（主要是维吾尔族人）；7%生活在俄罗斯（由鞑靼人、楚瓦什人和巴什基尔人以及各种小族群组成）。

^* Seventeen per cent (mostly Azeris) are in Iran; 7 per cent are in China (mostly Uyghurs); and 7 per cent (made up of Tatars, Chuvash and Bashkirs, and a variety of tiny groups) are in Russia.

^* 泰语也有“自由”的意思：所以理想也可以在欧洲传统之外找到。

^* Thai, too, means ‘free’: so the ideal can also be found outside the European tradition.

^*具有讽刺意味的是，许多小型土著社区也对自己的语言提出过类似的主张，而这些语言却从未传播开来。

^* There is some irony in that this claim is also made by many small indigenous communities for their own languages, which never spread at all.

^另一方面，当一种语言被成功吸收，但随后被另一种印欧语系语言取代时，其痕迹或许仍能从三千年后仍然存在的、与原语言截然不同的特征中看出。这曾被用来解释不列颠凯尔特语的一些怪异之处（参见第七章“Rún：凯尔特人的冲动性优势”，第292页）。

^* And on the other side of the coin, when such a language is successfully picked up, but then effaced by another Indo-European language, the evidence may still be seen in deeply alien features surviving three millennia later. This is what was suggested to account for quirks of British Celtic ( see Chapter 7, ‘Rún: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts’, p. 292).

^或者更明确、更专业地说，是历时社会语言学。另一个近期的例子，主要集中在非洲，是 Mufwene (2001)。

^* Or, more explicitly and technically, diachronic sociolinguistics. Another recent example, largely focused on Africa, is Mufwene (2001 ).

笔记

NOTES

序幕：语言的冲突

Prologue: A Clash of Languages

1.因此，它被记录在许多相近的编年史中。关于莫特库索马用纳瓦特尔语所说的话，我在此引用弗雷·贝尔纳迪诺·德·萨阿贡编纂的阿兹特克文明百科全书《新西班牙事务通史》（第十二卷第十六章）；关于科尔特斯用西班牙语所说的话，我引用其士兵贝尔纳尔·迪亚斯·德尔·卡斯蒂利亚的亲身经历，《征服新西班牙的真实历史》（第八十九章）。

1. As such, it was recorded in many near-contemporary chronicles. For Motecuhzoma’s words in Nahuatl, I here quote from the contemporary encyclopedia of Aztec civilisation, General History of the Affairs of New Spain (xii.16), compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, and for Cortés’s in Spanish from the eyewitness account of his serving soldier, Bernal Díaz del Castilla, True History of the Conquest of New Spain (ch. lxxxix).

1 忒弥斯托克利的地毯

1 Themistocles’ Carpet

1. Sykes (2001, 第 7、10 章)；Weale 等人 (2002)。参见第 7 章“逆境而上：英语的出现”，第 310 页。

1. Sykes (2001, chs 7, 10); Weale et al. (2002). See Chapter 7, ‘Against the odds: The advent of English’, p. 310.

2. Anderson (1991) 很好地介绍了民族概念短暂而充满波折的历史，以及它在世界各地移植应用的过程。

2. Anderson (1991) is a good guide to the short but fraught history of the concept of the nation, and its transplantation for use all over the world.

3. Sahagün，vi. 13。

3. Sahagün, vi. 13.

4. Karttunen（1990：291-4）。

4. Karttunen (1990: 291-4).

5.引自 King (1994: 136-7) 的三位纳瓦特尔语使用者的引语。

5. Quotations from three Nahuatl speakers, cited in King (1994: 136-7).

6. Aulus Gellius，Noctes Atticae，xvii.17：Quintus Ennius tria corda habere sese dicebat，quod loqui Graece et Osce et Latine sciret。

6. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, xvii.17: Quintus Ennius tria corda habere sese dicebat, quod loqui Graece et Osce et Latine sciret.

2 成为世界语言需要什么条件；或者，你永远无法预料

2 What It Takes to Be a World Language; or, You Never Can Tell

1.例如 Lipiński (1997:46)。

1. e.g. in Lipiński (1997:46).

2. Firth（1964：70-1）。这是对最初于 1937 年和 1930 年出版的作品的重新发行。

2. Firth (1964: 70-1). This is a reissue of works originally published in 1937 and 1930.

3. Whitfield（1999：36）。

3. Whitfield (1999: 36).

3 沙漠之花：中东的语言创新

3 The Desert Blooms: Language Innovation in the Middle East

1.泥板 II，II. 36-48；文本来自 Lambert (1960: 40)；由 WG Lambert 翻译，见 Pritchard (1969: 596-600)，略有修改。

1. Tablet II, II. 36-48; text from Lambert (1960: 40); trans. W. G. Lambert in Pritchard (1969: 596-600), slightly modified.

2. II. 70-8；文本来自 Lambert (1960: 148)；由 WG Lambert 翻译，见 Pritchard (1969:601)。

2. II. 70-8; text from Lambert (1960: 148); trans. W. G. Lambert in Pritchard (1969:601).

3. Lipiński (1997: 42-4)。

3. Lipiński (1997: 42-4).

4.《阿希卡尔之言》，第十四栏，208-223；文本来自林登伯格（1983：209），元音由彼得·T·丹尼尔斯提供；译自普里查德（1969：430）。

4. The Words of Ahiqar, col. xiv, 208-23; text from Lindenberger (1983: 209), with vowels supplied by Peter T. Daniels; trans. from Pritchard (1969: 430).

5.证据在于埃兰语的代词系统以及名词和动词形态的一些特征；参见 Diakonoff (1985: 3)；McAlpin (1981)。但其归属仍存在争议。

5. The evidence is in the Elamite pronoun system, and some features of noun and verb morphology; Diakonoff (1985: 3); McAlpin (1981). But the attribution is still controversial.

6. Lancel（1997：437）。

6. Lancel (1997: 437).

7.这些殖民地包括底格里斯河畔的塞琉西亚、欧拉乌斯河畔的塞琉西亚（即苏萨，以前的埃兰和波斯首都）以及巴克特里亚远东地区的现代阿伊哈努姆（即现代阿富汗）（Wiesehöfer 2001: 111-12）。

7. Such colonies included Seleuceia on the Tigris, Seleuceia on the Eulaeus—none other than Susa, formerly the Elamite and Persian capital—and modern Aï Khanum in the Bactrian far east, i.e. modern Afghanistan (Wiesehöfer 2001: 111-12).

8. Pritchard (1969: 56): Inanna's Descent to the Nether World (trans. SN Kramer).

8. Pritchard (1969: 56): Inanna’s Descent to the Nether World (trans. S. N. Kramer).

9. Tsereteli (1959 [1912])。

9. Tsereteli (1959 [1912]).

10. Schmandt-Besserat (1997) 中有阐述。

10. Expounded in Schmandt-Besserat (1997).

11. Hallo (1974: 185-6)；《伊南娜颂歌》在 Pritchard (1969: 579-82) 中有译文。

11. Hallo (1974: 185-6); the Hymn to Inanna is translated in Pritchard (1969: 579-82).

12. Pritchard (1969: 496): 致国王的情歌（SN Kramer 译），略作改编。

12. Pritchard (1969: 496): Love Song to a King (trans. S. N. Kramer), slightly adapted.

13. Pritchard (1969: 652): Ua-aua，一首苏美尔摇篮曲（SN Kramer 译），略有改编；<www.etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk:/section2/c24214.htm>。

13. Pritchard (1969: 652): Ua-aua, a Sumerian lullaby (trans. S. N. Kramer), slightly adapted; <www.etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk:/section2/c24214.htm>.

14. Thomsen (1984: 293-4)，引自《美国哲学学会会刊》，107(4)，第 1-12 页；（SN Kramer 译），略作改编。

14. Thomsen (1984: 293-4), quoting from Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 107(4), pp. 1-12; (trans. S. N. Kramer), slightly adapted.

15. Pritchard (1969: 651): 阿加德的诅咒，第 279-81 节（SN Kramer 译）；<www.etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk:/section2/tr215.htm>。

15. Pritchard (1969: 651): The Curse of Agade, vv. 279-81 (trans S. N. Kramer); <www.etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk:/section2/tr215.htm>.

16. McAlpin（1981：60）。

16. McAlpin (1981:60).

17. Malbran-Labat (1996: 56)。

17. Malbran-Labat (1996: 56).

18. Wiesehöfer（2001：10）。

18. Wiesehöfer (2001: 10).

19. Diakonoff (1985:24)。

19. Diakonoff (1985:24).

20.你好（1974：184）。

20. Hallo (1974: 184).

21. Kramer（1979：39）。

21. Kramer (1979: 39).

22.这是 Malbran-Labat (1996) 的分析。

22. This is the analysis of Malbran-Labat (1996).

23. Roux（1992：276）。

23. Roux (1992: 276).

24. Sawyer（1999：14）。

24. Sawyer (1999: 14).

25. Oded (1979)；Oded，引自 Garelli (1982: 438)；以及 Roux (1992: 308)。

25. Oded (1979); Oded, quoted in Garelli (1982: 438); and Roux (1992: 308).

26. Pritchard (1969: 284): 来自萨尔贡二世的展示首都霍尔萨巴德（Dŭr Sharrukîn）的展示铭文。

26. Pritchard (1969: 284): from a display inscription in Sargon II’s show capital of Khorsabad (Dŭr Sharrukîn).

27. Tadmor（1982：451）。

27. Tadmor (1982: 451).

28. Parpola (1999) 声称这是完全有意为之：“亚述的阿拉米化是一项精心策划的政策，旨在创造一种民族团结和认同感，如果帝国仍然是众多不同民族和语言的松散联盟，这种团结和认同感是永远不可能实现的。”

28. Parpola (1999) claims it was quite deliberate: ‘The Aramaization of Assyria was a calculated policy aimed at creating national unity and identity of a kind that could never have been achieved, had the Empire remained a loose conglomeration of a plethora of different nations and languages.’

29. Garelli（1982：442）。

29. Garelli (1982:442).

30. Kaufman（1997：114-15）。

30. Kaufman (1997: 114-15).

31. Dietrich（1967：87-90）。

31. Dietrich (1967: 87-90).

32.同上：90，引用 Dietrich（1979 年：第 10 项）。

32. ibid.: 90, citing Dietrich (1979: item 10).

33. Kaufman (1974: 165-70)。Parpola (1999) 指出，亚述巴尼拔图书馆藏的《吉尔伽美什史诗》（七世纪中期）中出现了一处笔误，这只能是说阿拉姆语的人所为：用阿拉姆语的“ mara ”字形代替了“儿子”字形（阿卡德语的“mara”字形）。

33. Kaufman (1974: 165-70). And Parpola (1999) notes a slip of the stylus in Ashurbanipal’s library copy of Gilgamesh (mid-seventh century), which could only have been made by an Aramaic speaker: the glyph for ‘lord’ (mara in Aramaic) in place of that for ‘son’ (mara in Akkadian).

34. Pritchard (1969: 317): 历史文献，5. 安条克·索特 (FH Weissbach 译)。

34. Pritchard (1969: 317): Historical documents, 5. Antiochus Soter (trans. F. H. Weissbach).

35.同上：136：关于巴力和阿纳特的诗，fC（HL Ginsberg 译）。

35. ibid.: 136: Poems about Baal and Anath, f.C (trans. H. L. Ginsberg).

36.创世记 xxvii.28 和 39。另见 Gordon (1971: 122)。

36. Genesis xxvii.28 and 39. See also Gordon (1971: 122).

37.以西结二十七章 3-11、25-6、32。

37. Ezekiel xxvii.3-11, 25-6, 32.

38.兰塞尔（1997：357）；克里布等人。 (1999: 225, 227)。

38. Lancel (1997: 357); Cribb et al. (1999: 225, 227).

39.奥古斯丁，《书信集》，第十七卷，第2章（致马克西姆斯·马达鲁斯的信）。

39. Augustine, Letters, xvii.2 (Letter to Maximus Madaurus).

40.普林尼，《自然史》，xviii.22。

40. Pliny, Naturalis Historia, xviii.22.

41. Hanno，Periplus（Codex Palatinus Graecus 398，fols 55r-56r）。

41. Hanno, Periplus (Codex Palatinus Graecus 398, fols 55r-56r).

42.奥古斯丁，《布道》，clxvii.4。

42. Augustine, Sermones, clxvii.4.

43.普劳图斯，Poenulus，930-1028。

43. Plautus, Poenulus, 930-1028.

44.同上，1002-12：布匿语的翻译遵循 Sznycer（1967：141-3）。

44. ibid., 1002-12: the translations of the Punic follow Sznycer (1967: 141-3).

45.李维，xxviii.46.16。

45. Livy, xxviii.46.16.

46. Kaufman（1997：115）。

46. Kaufman (1997: 115).

47. Greenfield (1985: 708)；Polotsky (1971)。

47. Greenfield (1985: 708); Polotsky (1971).

48.修昔底德，《历史》第四卷第50章。

48. Thucydides, iv.50.

49.但以理书 1.4.

49. Daniel i.4.

50. Lemaire 和 Lozachmeur（1996 年：passim）。

50. Lemaire and Lozachmeur (1996: passim).

51. Greenfield（1985：701，注2）。

51. Greenfield (1985: 701, n. 2).

52. Pritchard (1969: 428):《阿希卡尔的话语》（HL Ginsberg 译）。

52. Pritchard (1969: 428): The Words of Ahiqar (trans. H. L. Ginsberg).

53.同上：491：《象岛犹太人的信件》（HL Ginsberg 译）。

53. ibid.: 491: Letters of the Jews in Elephantine (trans. H. L. Ginsberg).

54. Schlumberger 等人（1958 年）。

54. Schlumberger et al. (1958).

55. Henning（1949）。

55. Henning(1949).

56.最近在马其顿首都佩拉发现了一块公元前四世纪的诅咒石碑，这表明它是一种希腊语变体方言，属于西北类型（Voutyras 1994）。

56. There is one curse-tablet of the fourth century BC, recently discovered at the Macedonian capital, Pella, which suggests that it was a variant Greek dialect, of the north-western type (Voutyras 1994).

57. Brock（1989：19）。

57. Brock (1989: 19).

58.佐伯（1937）。

58. Saeki (1937).

59. Johnson-Weiner (1999) 描述了他们自相矛盾地使用英语来保护德语的使用。

59. Their paradoxical use of English to protect the use of German is described in Johnson-Weiner (1999).

60.由威尔士语学习者 Pam Petro 描述（Petro 1997: 259-319）。

60. Described from a Welsh learner’s viewpoint by Pam Petro (Petro 1997: 259-319).

61.圣训的真实性存疑。Al-Tabrizi (1985: 6006)。

61. Hadith of disputed authenticity. Al-Tabrizi (1985: 6006).

62. Miquel (1968) 和 Planhol (1968) 尝试过。

62. Attempted in Miquel (1968) and Planhol (1968).

63.《古兰经》96.1-2。耐人寻味的是，这里的最后一个词也经常被翻译为“血块”。“alaqin”的语义根源似乎是“依附”的意思。

63. Qur’ān, xcvi.1-2. Tantalisingly, the last word here is also often translated as ‘blood clot’. The semantic root of ’alaqin seems to be the idea of clinging.

64. Braudel（1993：72），引用阿拉伯历史学家巴拉多里。

64. Braudel (1993: 72), quoting the Arab historian Baladhori.

65. Lewis (1995: 184-6)。

65. Lewis (1995: 184-6).

66. Frye（1993：99）。

66. Frye (1993:99).

67.同上：123。

67. ibid.: 123.

68.同上：169。

68. ibid.: 169.

69.同上：113。

69. ibid.: 113.

70.同上：169。

70. ibid.: 169.

71. Guichard (2000: 143)，引用 Jean-Pierre Molénat。

71. Guichard (2000: 143), quoting Jean-Pierre Molénat.

72. Corriente（1992：34）。

72. Corriente (1992:34).

73. Haddadou（1993：87）。

73. Haddadou (1993: 87).

74.伊本·赫勒敦，引自 Ellingham 等人（2001：552）；这位十三世纪的作家还写了一部柏柏尔人的历史。

74. Ibn Khaldūn, quoted in Ellingham et al. (2001: 552); this thirteenth-century author also wrote a history of the Berbers.

75. Ibn Khaldūn，Muqaddimat，引自阿姆斯特朗 (2000：90)。

75. Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimat, quoted in Armstrong (2000: 90).

76. Shaw（1976：5）。

76. Shaw (1976: 5).

77. Schoff (1912)。

77. Schoff (1912).

78. Hourani（1995：92-7）。

78. Hourani (1995: 92-7).

79. Dalby（1998：591-5）。

79. Dalby (1998: 591-5).

80. Clauson（2002：50，183）。

80. Clauson (2002: 50, 183).

81.阿卜杜勒·加尼（1929 年）。

81. ‘Abd al-Ghanī (1929).

82. Mango（1999：496）。

82. Mango (1999: 496).

83.Khaulavi（1979 年，第二卷：37）。

83. Khaulavi (1979, vol. ii: 37).

84. Braudel（1993：45）。

84. Braudel (1993:45).

85.同上：112。

85. ibid.: 112.

86.同上：41-2。

86. ibid.: 41-2.

四大生育胜利：埃及和中国

4 Triumphs of Fertility: Egyptian and Chinese

1.反式。利希海姆（1973：52）。

1. trans. Lichtheim (1973: 52).

2. Soothill 译（1910：73-4）。

2. trans. Soothill (1910: 73-4).

3. Pritchard（1969：415）。

3. Pritchard (1969: 415).

4. Erman（1894：544）。

4. Erman (1894: 544).

5.同上：106。

5. ibid.: 106.

6.同上：244。

6. ibid.: 244.

7. Loprieno (1995: 71) 指出。

7. Noted by Loprieno (1995: 71).

8. Moran（1992：xx-xxi）。

8. Moran (1992: xx-xxi).

9. Bacchylides（1961：14-16），碎片 20B；另见 Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1361。

9. Bacchylides (1961: 14-16), frag. 20B; also Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1361.

10. Greenfield（1985：701，注2）。

10. Greenfield (1985: 701, n. 2).

11.参见Loprieno（1995）。

11. See Loprieno (1995).

12. Johnson（1999：177）；Dodson（2001：90，92）。

12. Johnson (1999: 177); Dodson (2001: 90, 92).

13.据开罗阿拉伯人马格里齐（1365-1442 年）所述，引自 Lipinski（1997 年：29）。

13. According to the Cairene Arab Maqrizi (1365-1442), reported in Lipinski (1997: 29).

14.由帝国晚期的翻译局翻译：Ramsey（1987：32）。

14. By the Translators’ Bureau in late imperial times: Ramsey (1987: 32).

15.巴赞（1948）。

15. Bazin (1948).

16. Ramsey (1987: 102-3, 139-40, 236-7). 严格来说，粤语有九个声调，因为后来又增加了一个分声。

16. Ramsey (1987: 102-3, 139-40, 236-7). Strictly speaking Cantonese has nine tones, having added one more split.

17.桥本（1986）有些过于绝望地认为汉语在北方实际上已经“阿尔泰化”，但他的证据仅限于北京短暂的汉语皮钦语状态，以及青海一种偏离的当代方言，而青海的使用者可能同时会说藏语。

17. Hashimoto (1986) argues a little too desperately that Chinese was effectively ‘Altaicised’ in the north, but his evidence is confined to transitory pidginised states of the language in Beijing, and a deviant contemporary dialect in Qinghai, where speakers are probably bilingual in Tibetan.

18. Norman（1988：20）。

18. Norman (1988: 20).

19.王（1992：11）。

19. Wang (1992: 11).

20. Hall（1981：212）。

20. Hall (1981: 212).

21. Coedès (1968: 37)。参见第 5 章“东南亚的梵语”，第 204 页。

21. Coedès (1968: 37). See Chapter 5, ‘Sanskrit in South-East Asia’, p. 204.

22.王（1992：16）。

22. Wang (1992: 16).

23. Grousset（1970：66）。

23. Grousset (1970: 66).

24. Mote（1999：25，980）。

24. Mote (1999: 25, 980).

25.埃及的人口数据来自 Dollinger (2002)，中国的人口数据来自 Barraclough (1978: 80, 127)。McEvedy 和 Jones (1978) 认为罗马时代埃及的人口数较低，约为 500 万。他们直接驳斥了狄奥多罗斯 (i.31) 记载的公元前 300 年埃及人口 700 万的估计，认为这个数字“过高”。对于中国，他们指出公元 2 年的人口普查数据实际上统计的是 1180 万户家庭。他们估计，此后中国的人口一直维持在 5000 万左右，直到公元第二个千年之初，随着长江流域水稻种植面积的扩大，人口开始增长，在公元 1200 年达到 1.15 亿，但在蒙古统治时期人口回落，直到公元 1500 年才恢复。以上内容均不影响埃及和中国在近代以前人口密度极高的总体结论。

25. The figures for Egypt are derived from Dollinger (2002), and for China from Barraclough (1978: 80, 127). McEvedy and Jones (1978) suggest a rather lower figure for Egypt in Roman times, 5 million. They simply dismiss the estimate in Diodorus (i.31) of 7 million for Egypt in 300 BC as ‘too high’. For China, they point out that the AD 2 census figures are actually for 11.8 million households. They estimate that China’s population then stayed close to 50 million until the beginning of the second millennium AD, when it began to rise with the greater cultivation of rice in the Yangtze valley, reaching 115 million in 1200, but then falling back in the Mongol era and not recovering until 1500. None of the above affects the general point about the exceptionally high population density of Egypt and China in the pre-modern world.

26.数据来自 Russell (1958)。

26. Figures derived from Russell (1958).

27. Pritchard（1969：415）。

27. Pritchard (1969: 415).

28. Arnett（1982：45-7）。

28. Arnett (1982: 45-7).

29. Sallier 2,9,1 = Anastasi Papyri 7,4,6，引自 Erman (1894: 328)。

29. Sallier 2,9,1 = Anastasi Papyri 7,4,6, quoted in Erman (1894: 328).

30. Anastasi Papyri 5, 10, 8ff.，引自 Erman (1894: 328)。

30. Anastasi Papyri 5, 10, 8ff., quoted in Erman (1894: 328).

31. Ramsey（1987：121-3）。参见第 5 章，第 209 页。

31. Ramsey (1987: 121-3). See Chapter 5, p. 209.

32. Norman（1988：257-63）。

32. Norman (1988: 257-63).

33. Wilkinson（2000：735）。

33. Wilkinson (2000: 735).

34. 《经济学人》，1996 年 3 月 9 日，第 11 页。 4，引用于 Graddol (1997: 37)。

34. The Economist, 9 March 1996, p. 4, cited in Graddol (1997: 37).

35. Karlgren (1954)。其原则在 Norman (1988: 34-42) 中得到了简明扼要的阐述。

35. Karlgren (1954). Its principles are set out succinctly in Norman (1988: 34-42).

36. Pritchard（1969：440）。

36. Pritchard (1969: 440).

37. Wilkinson（2000：723）。

37. Wilkinson (2000: 723).

38.莫特译（1999：156），林天伟（1977）译：北宋吉若的三重新分析。《宋史研究集》 9, 147-98。

38. Translated by Mote (1999: 156), from Lin Tianwei (1977): Bei Song jiruo de sanzhong xin fenxi. Song shi yanjiu ji 9, 147-98.

39. Gao（1991：145）。

39. Gao (1991: 145).

40. Ramsey（1987：224）。

40. Ramsey (1987: 224).

5. 魅力如藤蔓：梵语的文化生涯

5 Charming Like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit

1.《梨俱吠陀》第七卷，第103章。

1. Rig Veda, vii. 103.

2.同上，第 10.34 页。

2. ibid., x.34.

3. Mahābhā⋅ya，i.1.

3. Mahābhā⋅ya, i.1.

4. Ojha，《Bharatiya Prācīna Lipi Mālā》，14，第 1 期。 6，归功于Canakya-nīti。

4. Ojha, Bharatiya Prācīna Lipi Mālā, 14, no. 6, attributed to Cānakya-nīti.

5.凯撒，德贝洛·加利科，vi。 14.

5. Caesar, De Bello Gallico, vi. 14.

6. Martin Prechtel，个人通讯。

6. Martin Prechtel, personal communication.

7.柏拉图，《斐德罗篇》 275A。

7. Plato, Phaedrus 275A.

8. 《摩诃婆罗多》，引自 Kesavan (1992:3)。

8. Mahābhārata, quoted by Kesavan (1992:3).

9. Brough (1968:31)。

9. Brough (1968:31).

10. Deshpande (1993: 24)，引用Mahābhā⋅ya，i，第 2 页。

10. Deshpande (1993: 24), quoting Mahābhā⋅ya, i, p. 2.

11. Patanjali，《摩诃婆罗多·耶·帕尼尼》，vi.3.109，Deshpande 译（1993：62）。

11. Patanjali, Mahābhā⋅ya on Panini, vi.3.109, trans. Deshpande (1993: 62).

12.《摩奴法典》第二卷，第18-22章。

12. Manu, ii. 18-22.

13. Deshpande（1993：86）。

13. Deshpande (1993: 86).

14.同上：16；Rājaśekhara，Kāvyamimāmsa，iv。

14. ibid.: 16; Rājaśekhara, Kāvyamimāmsa, iv.

15.斯特拉波，《地理志》第十五卷第一章第二十一节。

15. Strabo, xv.1.21.

16.同上，第十五卷，第1.64页。

16. ibid., xv. 1.64.

17. Milindapañha，i.9。

17. Milindapañha, i.9.

18. Fo-Kwo-Ki，xxxvi（Beal 1884：lxxi）。

18. Fo-Kwo-Ki, xxxvi (in Beal 1884: lxxi).

19.同上，第 xl 页（见 Beal 1884 年：第 1 部分，第 lxxix 页）。

19. ibid., xl (in Beal 1884: part 1, p. lxxix).

20.同上，xl（Beal 1884：第 1 部分，第 lxxxiii 页）。

20. ibid., xl (in Beal 1884: part 1, p. lxxxiii).

21. Coedès（1968：81-2）。

21. Coedès (1968: 81-2).

22. Si-Yu-Ki，ii.9（Beal 1884：第 1 部分，第 77-8 页）。

22. Si-Yu-Ki, ii.9 (in Beal 1884: part 1, pp. 77-8).

23. Gidwani（1994）。

23. Gidwani(1994).

24.梨俱吠陀，ii.20.7。

24. Rig Veda, ii.20.7.

25. Chatterji（1966：78）。

25. Chatterji (1966: 78).

26.司余记，x.9-11（见 Beal 1884：第 2 部分，第 204-8 页）。

26. Si-Yu-Ki, x.9-11 (in Beal 1884: part 2, pp. 204-8).

27. 《潘卡坦特拉》第31卷。

27. Pañcatantra, v. 31.

28. Keith Taylor，在 Tarling (1999: 195) 中。

28. Keith Taylor, in Tarling (1999: 195).

29. Kamara、Pōdoukē和Sōpatma，意为“排成一排”，在公元一世纪的厄立特里亚海航行记（第 60 章）中被引用。其中，前两个据推测位于卡韦里河三角洲和本地治里（更广为人知的名称是 Pondicherry）。

29. Kamara, Pōdoukē and Sōpatma, ‘lying in a row’, are quoted in the first century AD Periplous of the Erythraean Sea (ch. 60). Of these, the first two are presumably on the delta of the Kaveri river and at Puducherry (better known as Pondicherry).

30. Yule 和 Burnell (1986: 456): “Goozerat 有一句谚语：‘去爪哇的人永不回来。如果他碰巧回来，那么他带回来的钱足够两代人生活。’ Ršs Mšlš, ii.82 (1878 edn: 418)

30. Yule and Burnell (1986: 456): ‘It is a saying in Goozerat,—"Who goes to Java Never returns. If by chance he return, Then for two generations to live upon, Money enough he brings back Ršs Mšlš, ii.82 (1878 edn: 418).

31. Majumdar (1975:21)。

31. Majumdar (1975:21).

32. Coedès (1968: 26-7, 36, 275)。

32. Coedès (1968: 26-7, 36, 275).

33.同上：37、276。

33. ibid.: 37, 276.

34. Majumdar（1975：13）。

34. Majumdar (1975: 13).

35.同上：19-20。

35. ibid.: 19-20.

36.同上：48。

36. ibid.: 48.

37. 《摩诃婆罗多》，阿兰亚卡帕瓦，173；马宗达尔（1975：25-7）。

37. Mahābhārata, Āranyakaparva, 173; Majumdar (1975: 25-7).

38. Coedès（1968：369）。

38. Coedès (1968: 369).

39. Fo-Kwo-Ki，xl（Beal 1884：第 1 部分，第 lxxxi 页）。

39. Fo-Kwo-Ki, xl (in Beal 1884: part 1, p. lxxxi).

40. Coedès (1968: 17)；Bechert 和 Gombrich (1984: 147)。

40. Coedès (1968: 17); Bechert and Gombrich (1984: 147).

41. Ramsay（1987：121-4）。

41. Ramsay (1987: 121-4).

42.关于藏文及其起源的细节，我参考了 Beyer (1992:40-50)。

42. For the details of the Tibetan script and its origin, I have been dependent on Beyer (1992:40-50).

43.有一些证据表明，藏族人可能更早就会书写。现存的公元650年至747年间的编年史中，有关于公元655年的记载：国王留在梅尔克，宰相斯通赞将国王的命令写给了诺尔提。

43. There is some evidence that Tibetans could write earlier than this. There are extant contemporary annals of the period 650 to 747, and for the year 655 we find: The King stayed at Mer-khe, and the prime minister Ston-tsan wrote the text of his commands to Ngor-ti.

事实上，藏文的传入传统上（例如在十四世纪的一部历史著作中）被认为是藏族学者兼政府大臣通弥阿努伊布所为，据说他于七世纪中叶被派往印度出使。但通弥阿努伊布可能是一个虚构人物，因为在中亚发现的真正古代西藏文献中并没有他的名字，而最早的藏文语法著作也被认为是他所著。

In fact the introduction of the script is traditionally (i.e. in a history from the fourteenth century) credited to a Tibetan scholar and government minister, Thon-mi Anui-bu, said to have been sent on a mission to India in the mid-seventh century. But Thon-mi may have been an invented figure, since he is omitted from genuinely ancient records of Tibet found in central Asia, while the earliest grammatical works on Tibetan are also attributed to him.

44. Beyer（1992：36-7）。

44. Beyer (1992: 36-7).

45.如 van Leur (1955: 113) 所推测，并在 Hall (1981: 231-3) 中讨论过。

45. As conjectured in van Leur (1955: 113) and discussed in Hall (1981: 231-3).

46. Basham (1967:491)。

46. Basham (1967:491).

47. Rangarajan（1992：18-21）。

47. Rangarajan (1992: 18-21).

48. Si-Yu-Ki，ix（Beal 1884：第 2 部分，第 171-2 页）。

48. Si-Yu-Ki, ix (in Beal 1884: part 2, pp. 171-2).

6 三千年唯我论：希腊的冒险

6 Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek

1.老寡头，雅典宪法，ii.8：kaì hoi mèn Héllēnes idíāi māllon kaì ph bar;nēi kaì diaítēi kai skh mati khrõbar;ntai, Athēnaĩoi dè kekraménēi ex hapántōn tõbar;n Hellébar;nōn kaì野蛮人。

1. Old Oligarch, Athenian Constitution, ii.8: kaì hoi mèn Héllēnes idíāi māllon kaì phbar;nēi kaì diaítēi kai skhmati khrõbar;ntai, Athēnaĩoi dè kekraménēi ex hapántōn tõbar;n Hellébar;nōn kaì barbárōn.

2.希罗多德，《viii.144》（本章题词引用）。

2. Herodotus, viii.144 (quoted in the epigraph to this chapter).

3.同上，第四卷，183.4。据斯特拉波记载，他们居住在红海沿岸，第十七卷，第一章，第二节。

3. ibid., iv. 183.4. They lived along the Red Sea coast, according to Strabo, xvii.1.2.

4.埃斯库罗斯，《阿伽门农》，1050-1。

4. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 1050-1.

5.修昔底德，《历史》第二卷，第35-46章。

5. Thucydides, ii.35-46.

6. tèbar;n pólin pábar;san tŋbar;s Helládos paídeusin eĩnai：修昔底德，ii.41。

6. tèbar;n pólin pábar;san tŋbar;s Helládos paídeusin eĩnai: Thucydides, ii.41.

7.米南德，片段 72，编辑。科克。

7. Menander, fragment 72, ed. Kock.

8.赫拉克利特，残篇119。

8. Heraclitus, fragment 119.

9.阿里斯托芬，《骑士》，1169年。

9. Aristophanes, Knights, 1169.

10.赫西俄德，《妇女名录》（勒布版，残篇 4）。

10. Hesiod, Catalogues of Women (Loeb edn, fr. 4).

11.修昔底德，《历史》第三卷，第38章，第4节。

11. Thucydides, iii.38.4.

12. Buck（1955：10-14）。

12. Buck (1955: 10-14).

13.斯特拉波，《地理志》第六卷第一章第二节。

13. Strabo, vi.1.2.

14.第 30.1664 和 20.326 段（希腊-阿拉姆语佛教文本），Schlumberger 等人 (1958)。参见第 5 章“梵语的特征”，第 187 页，以及第 3 章“阿拉姆语——沙漠之歌：西亚的通用语”，第 84 页。

14. Segs 30.1664 and 20.326 (Greek-Aramaic Buddhist text), Schlumberger et al. (1958). See Chapter 5, ‘The character of Sanskrit’, p. 187, and Chapter 3, ‘Aramaic—the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia’, p. 84.

15. Salomon (1998: 265-7). Hēliodōros译为Heliodora，而Antialkidas译为Amtalikita。——这很符合阿育王的传统，其中包含着对佛教美德的无端劝诫。参见第五章“局外人的观点”，第192页。

15. Salomon (1998: 265-7). Hēliodōros comes out as Heliodora-, but Antialkidas as Amtalikita.- Very much in the Aśoka tradition, it contains gratuitous urgings to Buddhist virtue. See Chapter 5, ‘Outsiders’ views’, p. 192.

16. Ghirshman（1954：229-30）。

16. Ghirshman (1954: 229-30).

17.芒果（1980 年：第 1 章）。

17. Mango (1980: ch. 1).

18.普鲁塔克，《马克·安东尼传》，第27章。

18. Plutarch, Mark Antony, xxvii.

19. 剑桥古代史，第 7 卷，第 1-2^页，第 180 页。

19. Cambridge Ancient History, vol. vii.1², p. 180.

20. Drew-Bear 等人（1999）。

20. Drew-Bear et al. (1999).

21.斯特拉波，《地理志》第四卷第一章第五节。

21. Strabo, iv.1.5.

22.普劳图斯，埃皮迪库斯，iii.3.29。

22. Plautus, Epidicus, iii.3.29.

23.波利比乌斯，《历史》，第三卷，第59章。

23. Polybius, Histories, iii.59.

24.维吉尔，《埃涅阿斯纪》，vi.847-53。

24. Vergil, Aeneid, vi.847-53.

25. pergraecari est epulis et potationibus inservire：在公元二世纪末的 Sextus Pomponius Festus 的字典中。这个词在普劳图斯身上很常见，普劳图斯是公元前二世纪为罗马观众改编的希腊戏剧的伟大改编者。

25. pergraecari est epulis et potationibus inservire: in the dictionary of Sextus Pomponius Festus of the late second century AD. The word is common in Plautus, the great adapter of Greek plays for Roman audiences in the second century BC.

26. Sawyer（1999：37）。

26. Sawyer (1999: 37).

27.同上：35。

27. ibid.: 35.

28.资料来源是雅典智者菲洛斯特拉图斯，他所著的《泰阿那的阿波罗尼奥斯传》是公元二世纪末由罗马皇帝塞普蒂米乌斯·塞维鲁的妻子委托撰写的。这是一部宗教文学作品，因此其准确性一直备受质疑；但伍德科克（1966：130）认为，考古学表明，作者实际上对这片远离当时罗马和地中海的土地的细节了如指掌。

28. The source is an Athenian sophist, Philostratus, whose Life of Apollonius of Tyana was commissioned at the end of the second century AD by the wife of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus. This is a work of devotional literature, and so its accuracy has been questioned; but Woodcock (1966: 130) argues that archaeology shows the author was in fact well informed about details of this land so remote from contemporary Rome and the Mediterranean.

29. Wiesehöfer（2001：122）。

29. Wiesehöfer (2001: 122).

30.同上：155。

30. ibid.: 155.

31. Itinerarium Aetheriae (ed. H. Pétré, Paris, 1948), xlvii.3-4 (引自 Mango 1980: 19)。

31. Itinerarium Aetheriae (ed. H. Pétré, Paris, 1948), xlvii.3-4 (quoted in Mango 1980: 19).

32.芒果（1980：25）。

32. Mango (1980: 25).

33. De Thematibus，导论，Pertusi 版，1952 年，引自 Horrocks (1997:150)。

33. De Thematibus, Introduction, Pertusi edn, 1952, quoted in Horrocks (1997:150).

34.普罗科皮乌斯，《秘史》，xviii.20-21。

34. Procopius, Secret History, xviii.20-21.

35. 约翰主教以弗所教会史第三部分，R. Payne Smith 译。牛津，1860 年，第 423-424 页（引自 Mango 1980：24）。

35. Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History of John Bishop of Ephesus, trans. R. Payne Smith. Oxford, 1860, pp. 423-4 (quoted in Mango 1980: 24).

36. P. Lemerle，《莫奈姆瓦西编年史》（La Chronique improprement dite de Monemvasie），载《拜占庭研究评论》（Revue des etudes byzantines），第21卷（1963年），第9-10页（引自Mango 1980: 24）。卡菲尔人可能是皈依伊斯兰教的人；色雷斯人并非色雷斯人，而是来自安纳托利亚西部的色雷斯地区。

36. P. Lemerle, La Chronique improprement dite de Monemvasie, in Revue des etudes byzantines, xxi (1963), pp. 9-10 (quoted in Mango 1980: 24). The Kafirs were perhaps Muslim converts; the Thracēsians were not Thracians, but from the Thracēsian theme, in the west of Anatolia.

37.利奥六世，Tactica，载于Patrologia Graeca，编辑。 JP Migne，cvii，969A（引自 Mango 1980：28）。

37. Leo VI, Tactica, in Patrologia Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne, cvii, 969A (quoted in Mango 1980: 28).

7. 欧洲的争夺：凯尔特人、罗马人、日耳曼人和斯拉夫人

7 Contesting Europe: Celt, Roman, German and Slav

1.希罗多德，《历史》第二卷第33章，第四卷第49章。库涅特人（又名库涅西亚人）可能被正确地安置在赫拉克勒斯之柱的后面，因为斯特拉波，《历史》第三卷第一章第四节，将这片区域（即今天的阿尔加维）称为库内乌斯——尽管他认为它是根据其楔形形状在拉丁语中命名的。

1. Herodotus, ii.33, iv.49. The Cynetes, aka Cynesians, may have been correctly placed just beyond the Pillars of Hercules, since Strabo, iii.1.4, calls this area, the modern Algarve, Cuneus—though he thought that it was named in Latin after its wedge-like shape.

2. Jacoby（1923 年：第 70 号，第 30 行）。

2. Jacoby (1923: no. 70, fr. 30).

3.斯特拉波，《史学百科全书》7.3.8；阿里安，《史学百科全书》1.4.6-8。

3. Strabo, vii.3.8; Arrian, i.4.6-8.

4. Táin Bo Cúailnge（《伦斯特之书》，第二版），11. 4733-6，译。 Cecile O' Rahilly：mono tháeth in fhirmimintni cona frossaib rétland for dunignúis in talman no mani thí in fharrgi eithrech ochargorm for tulmóing in bethad no mani máe in talam…

4. Táin Bo Cúailnge (Book of Leinster, 2nd Recension), 11. 4733-6, trans. Cecile O’ Rahilly: mono tháeth in fhirmimintni cona frossaib rétland for dunignúis in talman nó mani thí in fharrgi eithrech ochargorm for tulmóing in bethad nó mani máe in talam…

5.凯撒，德贝洛加利科，伊利诺伊州

5. Caesar, De Bello Gallico, i.l.

6.狄奥多罗斯·西库鲁斯，《狄奥多罗斯·西库鲁斯传》第29-31卷。

6. Diodorus Siculus, v.29-31.

7.斯特拉波，《地理志》第七卷，第1章第2节。

7. Strabo, vii. 1.2.

8.亚里士多德，残篇 610；政治学，第七卷，第十章。

8. Aristotle, fr. 610; Politics, vii.10.

9.普林尼，《罗马史》第三卷，第57章，引用了当时在场的克利塔库斯的话。阿里安，《罗马史》第七卷，第15章，第5-6节，倾向于否定这一说法，因为“除了罗马人之外，没有其他民族像罗马人那样对专制及其名称如此憎恨”。

9. Pliny, iii.57, quoting Clitarchus, who was there. Arrian, vii. 15.5-6, is inclined to discount it, ‘given that no other people [than the Romans] was so possessed by hatred of despotism and its very name’.

10.波利比乌斯，《历史》，115。

10. Polybius, Histories, i.l.5.

11.同上，vi.52。

11. ibid., vi.52.

12.同上，vi.56。

12. ibid., vi.56.

13.斯特拉波，《地理志》第六卷第一章第二节。

13. Strabo, vi.1.2.

14.普林尼，《自然史》，29.1.7-14。

14. Pliny, Natural History, 29.1.7.-14.

15.尤维纳利斯，《第六卷》455。

15. Juvenal, vi.455.

16. Aulus Gellius，《Noctes Atticae》，xvii。 17.

16. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, xvii. 17.

17.斯特拉波，第3卷第6章。

17. Strabo, v.3.6.

18.塔西佗将维内蒂人和芬尼人归类为既非日耳曼人也非萨尔马提亚人（萨尔马提亚人是伊朗游牧民族，与斯基泰人有关）是正确的。但他随后又将佩乌奇尼人等同于巴斯塔奈人，而巴斯塔奈人是已知的日耳曼人（斯特拉波，《历史》7.3.17）。

18. Tacitus was right to classify the Veneti and Fenni as neither Germans nor Sarmatians (who were Iranian nomads, related to the Scythians). But he goes on to identify the Peucini with the Bastarnae, known to have been Germanic (Strabo, vii.3.17).

19.塔西佗，《日耳曼尼亚志》，第46卷。

19. Tacitus, Germania, xlvi.

20.托勒密《地理学》，iii.5：“katékhei dè tèbar;n Sarmatían ethnē mégista hoí te Ouenédai par' hólon tòn Ouenedikòn kólpon”。

20. Ptolemy, Geography, iii.5: ’katékhei dè tèbar;n Sarmatían éthnē mégista hoí te Ouenédai par’ hólon tòn Ouenedikòn kólpon’.

21.斯特拉波，《地理志》第七卷第三章第二节，第七卷第五章第二节。

21. Strabo, vii.3.2, vii.5.2.

22. Lambert (1997: 123)。这两件陶器发现于法国涅夫勒省和欧坦省。拉格劳芬斯克陶窑的序号见第131页。

22. Lambert (1997: 123). These two were found in the regions of Nièvre and Autun in France. The ordinal numbers from the potter’s kiln in La Graufenesque are on p. 131.

23.波利比乌斯，《历史》，第二卷，第17章；李维，《历史》，第五卷，第34章。参见 Cunliffe (1997:71)。

23. Polybius, Histories, ii.17; Livy, v.34. Cf. Cunliffe (1997:71).

24.马提亚尔，《警句集》 ，第四卷，第60章，第8节。

24. Martial, Epigrams, iv.60.8.

25. Lehmann（1987：76ff.）。

25. Lehmann (1987:76ff.).

26. Isidore，词源，xiv.6.6：“Scotia idem et Hibernia proxima Britanniae insula，spatio terrarum angustior，sed situ fecundior”。 Haec ab Africa 位于 Boream porrigitur。 Cuius parles Priores Hiberiam et Cantabricum Oceanum endunt, unde et Hibernia dicta …'

26. Isidore, Etymologiae, xiv.6.6: ’Scotia idem et Hibernia proxima Britanniae insula, spatio terrarum angustior, sed situ fecundior. Haec ab Africa in Boream porrigitur. Cuius parles priores Hiberiam et Cantabricum Oceanum intendunt, unde et Hibernia dicta …’

27. Avienus，Ora Maritima，11. 108-16：'Ast hinc duobus in sacram，sic insulam / Dixere prisci，solibus cursi rati est./Haec inter undas multa[m] caespitem iacet，/Eamque Late gens Hiernorum colit./Propinqua rursus insula Albionum patet./Tartesiisque in terminos Oestrumnidum/negotiandi moserat。 Carthaginis/Etiam coloni[s] et vulgus inter Herculis/Agitans columnas haec ad[h]ibant aequora。

27. Avienus, Ora Maritima, 11. 108-16: ’Ast hinc duobus in sacram, sic insulam / Dixere prisci, solibus cursi rati est. / Haec inter undas multa[m] caespitem iacet,/Eamque late gens Hiernorum colit./Propinqua rursus insula Albionum patet./Tartesiisque in terminos Oestrumnidum/negotiandi mos erat. Carthaginis/Etiam coloni[s] et vulgus inter Herculis/Agitans columnas haec ad[h]ibant aequora.’

28.同上，II。 98-9：“ ……金属迪维特/斯坦尼·阿特克·铅比……”

28. ibid., II. 98-9: ’ …metallo divites/stanni atque plumbi …’

29. Cunliffe（1997 年，第 8 章）；Cunliffe（2001 年，特别是第 7 章）。

29. Cunliffe (1997, ch. 8); Cunliffe (2001, esp. ch. 7).

30. Gensler (1993) 对它们进行了详尽的描述，并进行了全球比较。

30. They are detailed meticulously, and compared globally, in Gensler (1993).

31.波利比乌斯，《历史》，第二卷，第17章。

31. Polybius, Histories, ii.17.

32.凯里 (1954: 180) 报道。

32. Reported in Cary (1954: 180).

33. Gildas，《De Excidio Britonum》，6：“ …… it ut in proverbium et derisum longe Lateque efferretur quod Britanni nec in bello fortes nec inpace fideles”。

33. Gildas, De Excidio Britonum, 6: ‘…ita ut in proverbium et derisum longe lateque efferretur quod Britanni nec in bello fortes nec in pace fideles’.

34.塔西佗，《清唱对话》，x。 1-2.

34. Tacitus, Dialogus de Oratoribus, x. 1-2.

35.爱任纽，Adversus Haereses，i，序言。

35. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, i, preface.

36. Domitius Ulpianus，文摘，xxxi.1.11。

36. Domitius Ulpianus, Digest, xxxi.1.11.

37. Sidonius Apollinaris，书信，iii.3。

37. Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistulae, iii.3.

38.普鲁塔克，马略，完。

38. Plutarch, Marius, fin.

39.塔西佗，《农夫传》，第21章。

39. Tacitus, Agricola, xxi.

40.尤维纳利斯，《讽刺诗》，第十五卷，第110-112行。

40. Juvenal, Satires, xv.110-12.

41. Jackson (1994 [1953]: 107-10); Smith (1983)。

41. Jackson (1994 [1953]: 107-10); Smith (1983).

42. Tomlin (1987)。

42. Tomlin (1987).

43.梅南德斯·皮达尔（1968：19）。

43. Menéndez Pidal (1968: 19).

44. Harris（1989：315-16）。

44. Harris (1989: 315-16).

45.奥古斯丁，《基督教教义》，序言 4。

45. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, prologue 4.

46.凯撒留斯·阿雷拉滕西斯 (Caesarius Arelatensis)，《布道》，vi.l-2； viii.l.

46. Caesarius Arelatensis, Sermones, vi.l-2; viii.l.

47.尤特罗皮乌斯在四世纪写道：“图拉真征服达契亚后，将无数罗马世界各地的人民迁往那里耕种田地和城市。”《城市建设简史》 viii.6。

47. Eutropius had written in the fourth century: ‘Trajan, having conquered Dacia, had transferred there boundless numbers of people from all over the Roman world to tend the fields and the cities.’ Breviarium ab urbe condita, viii.6.

48.布尔西兹 (1967: 30, 135-7)。

48. Bourciez (1967: 30, 135-7).

49.证据在 Keys (1999, 第 13-16 章) 中进行了整理。

49. The evidence is marshalled in Keys (1999, chs 13-16).

50. Weale 等人（2002）。

50. Weale et al. (2002).

51. Terrence Kaufman 的计算，使用标准的斯瓦迪士语两百个基本词义列表。Thomason 和 Kaufman (1988: 365)。

51. Terrence Kaufman’s calculation, using the standard Swadesh list of two hundred basic word meanings. Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 365).

8 拉丁语的第一次死亡

8 The First Death of Latin

1. Monumenta Germaniae Historica，Scriptorum，i，1.31.14。

1. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptorum, i, 1.31.14.

2.这段文字引自 Wright (1982:109)，维也纳国家图书馆藏有 795 号藏品。我按照 Migne（Wright 也引用过他）的说法，将sene更正为sine。

2. This is quoted in Wright (1982:109), as at Vienna Nationalbibliothek 795. I have followed Migne (also quoted by Wright) in correcting sene to sine.

3.我在此陈述罗杰·赖特自1982年以来通过大量文献研究确立的论点，并将其视为一个事实。另一种观点则假设拉丁语的发音在过去的四个世纪里保持不变，无需任何特殊论证或教学。然而，自大元音变位（15至16世纪）以来，英国的经验表明，即使是研究与自身母语截然不同的书面语言的学者，也并非总能轻易地将其语音系统与日常口语的语音系统区分开来，除非经过大量的论证和辩论。

3. I am stating here as simple fact the thesis established with great documentary effort by Roger Wright since 1982. The alternative would be to suppose that the pronunciation of Latin had been kept constant for the preceding four centuries, without any special pleading or teaching. The experience in England since the Great Vowel Shift (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries) shows that scholars even of a written language that is quite distinct from their own do not, without copious urging and dispute, exert themselves to keep its sound system separate from that used in their daily speech.

4. De dissensionibus filiorum Ludovici pii , iii, ch. 5，日期为 Studer 和 Waters (1924: 24) 至 841-3。全文已被引用。

4. De dissensionibus filiorum Ludovici pii, iii, ch. 5, dated by Studer and Waters (1924: 24) to 841-3. The text is there quoted in full.

5. Wright（1982：124）。

5. Wright (1982: 124).

6. “ ……Et ut easdem omelias quisque aperte Transferre Studeat in rusticam Romanam linguam aut Thiotiscam, quo facilius cuncti possint intellegere quae dicuntur.”如前所述：120, 122，来自Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum , iii, 2.1。

6. ‘…Et ut easdem omelias quisque aperte transferre studeat in rusticam Romanam linguam aut Thiotiscam, quo facilius cuncti possint intellegere quae dicuntur.’ As quoted in ibid.: 120, 122, from Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum, iii, 2.1.

7. Menéndez Pidal (1972: 24-5)；Wright (1982: 173) 也引用了它。

7. Menéndez Pidal (1972: 24-5); also quoted in Wright (1982: 173).

8.但丁，《普通口才》，i.9.8-11：'nec aliter mirum videatur quod dicimus, quam percipere iuvenem exoletum, queern exolescere non videmus: nam quae paulatim moventur, minime perpenduntur a nobis, et Quanto longiora tempora variatio rei ad perpendi要求，tanto rem illam stabilorem putamus。 Non etenim admiramur, si eximationes hominum, qui parum distance a brutis, putant eandem civitatem sub invariabili semper civicasse sermone, cum sermonis variatio civitatis eiusdem non sine longissima temporum successione paulatim contingat, et hominum vita sat etiam, ipsa sua natura,布雷维西马。 si ergo per eandem gentem sermo variatur, ut dictum est, success per tempora, nec stare ullo modo potest, necesse est, ut disiunctim abmotimque morantibus varie varietur, ceu varievarieur mores ethabitus, qui nec natura nec consortio verifyantur, sed humanis beneplacitis localique一致的纳斯昆图尔。 Hinc moti sunt Inventiones grammaticae facultatis: quae quidem grammatica nihil aliud est quam quaedam inalterabilis locutionis identitas diversihus temporibus atque locis.'

8. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, i.9.8-11: ’nec aliter mirum videatur quod dicimus, quam percipere iuvenem exoletum, quern exolescere non videmus: nam quae paulatim moventur, minime perpenduntur a nobis, et quanto longiora tempora variatio rei ad perpendi requirit, tanto rem illam stabiliorem putamus. non etenim admiramur, si extimationes hominum, qui parum distant a brutis, putant eandem civitatem sub invariabili semper civicasse sermone, cum sermonis variatio civitatis eiusdem non sine longissima temporum successione paulatim contingat, et hominum vita sit etiam, ipsa sua natura, brevissima. si ergo per eandem gentem sermo variatur, ut dictum est, successive per tempora, nec stare ullo modo potest, necesse est, ut disiunctim abmotimque morantibus varie varietur, ceu varie variantur mores et habitus, qui nec natura nec consortio confirmantur, sed humanis beneplacitis localique congruitate nascuntur. hinc moti sunt inventores grammaticae facultatis: quae quidem grammatica nihil aliud est quam quaedam inalterabilis locutionis identitas diversihus temporibus atque locis.’

9.但丁，Convivio，i.2.9：“Movemi limore d'infamia，e movemi desiderio di dottrinadarla quale altri veramentedarnon può。”

9. Dante, Convivio, i.2.9: ’Movemi limore d’infamia, e movemi desiderio di dottrina dare la quale altri veramente dare non può.’

III 海上语言

III Languages by Sea

9 拉丁语的第二次死亡

9 The Second Death of Latin

1. 《英语和马来语对话录：或某些常用语》，最初由但丁人戈塔杜斯·阿图修斯大师以拉丁语、马来语和马达加斯加语写成，经勤勉刻苦，现由商人奥古斯丁·斯伯丁忠实地翻译成英语，以飨后将前往东印度群岛的读者。本书于1614年在伦敦由费利克斯·金斯顿为威廉·韦尔比印刷，并在其位于圣保罗教堂墓地天鹅旅馆招牌下的店铺出售。

1. Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages: or, Certaine Common Formes of Speech, first written in Latin, Malaian, and Madasgascar tongues, by the diligence and painfull endeuour of Master Gotardus Arthusius, a Dantisker, and now faithfully translated into the English tongue by Augustine Spalding Merchant, for their sakes, who happily shall hereafter undertake a voyage to the East-Indies. At London, Imprinted by Felix Kyngston for William Welby, and are to bee sold at his shop in Pauls Church-yard, at the signe of the Swan, 1614.

2. Reynolds 和 Wilson (1968: 120)。

2. Reynolds and Wilson (1968: 120).

3. Febvre 和 Martin (1976: 248-9)。

3. Febvre and Martin (1976: 248-9).

4.同上：289-95。

4. ibid.: 289-95.

5. Anderson（1991：39-41）。

5. Anderson (1991: 39-41).

十大篡位者：西班牙在新世界

10 Usurpers of Greatness: Spanish in the New World

1.希罗多德，iv.106；斯特拉博，iv.5.4。

1. Herodotus, iv.106; Strabo, iv.5.4.

2. “E certifico a vuestra alteza que yo conté desde una mezquita cuatrocientos treinta y tantas tones en la dicha ciudad, y todas son de mezquitas.” Cortés，Cartas de Relación de la Conquista de México，Carta Segunda（1982 年，马德里：Espasa Calpe，第 7 版，第 50 页）。

2. ’E certifico a vuestra alteza que yo conté desde una mezquita cuatrocientos treinta y tantas tones en la dicha ciudad, y todas son de mezquitas.’ Cortés, Cartas de Relación de la Conquista de México, Carta Segunda (1982, Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 7th edn, p. 50).

3. Joseph de Acosta，《印度的自然与道德史》，第一卷，第 160 页（引自 Crosby 1972：38）。

3. Joseph de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, i, p. 160 (quoted in Crosby 1972: 38).

4. '...pareció al Almirante que debía llevar a Castilla ... algunos indios paraque aprendiesen la lengua de Castilla y saber dellos los Secretos de la tierra, y para instruillos en las cosas de la fe ...' De las Casas (1957 [c.1530], i.46: 163)。德拉斯卡萨斯在描述五十年后发生的事件时，发现这种行为不可原谅，因为这相当于绑架。

4. ’…pareció al Almirante que debía llevar a Castilla … algunos indios paraque aprendiesen la lengua de Castilla y saber dellos los secretos de la tierra, y para instruillos en las cosas de la fe …’ De las Casas (1957 [c.1530], i.46: 163). De las Casas, describing the events fifty years later, found this act unpardonable, since it amounted to kidnapping.

5.例如 Rosenblat (1964: 192-3)。

5. e.g. in Rosenblat (1964: 192-3).

6. Inca Garcilaso，根据戈麦斯的说法（1995：82）。

6. Inca Garcilaso, according to Gómez (1995: 82).

7. Inca Garcilaso，根据 Abbott（1996：685）。

7. Inca Garcilaso, according to Abbott (1996: 685).

8. Instrucción Real，1503 年 3 月 20 日至 29 日，致尼古拉斯·奥万多 (Nicolas Ovando)，载于《Collección de documentos inéditos del Archivo de Indias》，xxxi，第 163-4 页。

8. Instrucción Real, 20 and 29 March 1503, to Nicolas Ovando, in Collección de documentos inéditos del Archivo de Indias, xxxi, pp. 163-4.

9.例如，Alvar (2000) 对此有所描述。

9. This is described in, for example, Alvar (2000).

10. Rosenblat (1964: 211) 中列出了著名的混血将军和作家，特别是历史学家。

10. There is a list of noted mestizo generals and writers, especially historians, in Rosenblat (1964: 211).

11. Inca Garcilaso 引用的 Blas Valera 神父的话，《Commentarios Reales》，第一部分，vii.3：“……La cual Opinión ninguno que la oye deja de entender que nació antes de flaqueza de ánimo que torpeza de enendimiento。”

11. Father Blas Valera’s words, quoted by Inca Garcilaso, Commentarios Reales, part I, vii.3: ’… La cual opinión ninguno que la oye deja de entender que nació antes de flaqueza de ánimo que torpeza de entendimiento.’

12. Abbott (1996: 91)。

12. By Abbott (1996: 91).

13. Inca Garcilaso 引用的 Blas Valera 神父的话，《Commentarios Reales》，第一部分，vii.3：“ ……porqué la semejanza y conformidad de las palabras casimpre suelen reconciliar y traer a verdadera union y amistad a los hombres。”

13. Father Blas Valera’s words, quoted by Inca Garcilaso, Commentarios Reales, part I, vii.3: ‘… porqué la semejanza y conformidad de las palabras casi siempre suelen reconciliar y traer a verdadera union y amistad a los hombres.’

14.里卡德（Ricard，1933 [1966]：23）指出，1559年墨西哥有380名方济各会修士、210名多明我会修士和212名奥斯定会修士。他们分布稀疏：平均每个修道院只有五名宗教人员。罗森布拉特（Rosenblat，1964：210）给出的数据显示，当时墨西哥人口为450万，其中西班牙裔居民（户主）有6464人。

14. Ricard (1933 [1966]: 23) says that in Mexico in 1559 there were 380 Franciscans, 210 Dominicans and 212 Augustinians. They were thinly spread: the average convent had five religious staff. Rosenblat (1964: 210) gives the then population of Mexico as 4.5 million, with the number of Spanish vecinos (heads of households) as 6,464.

15.玻利维亚的拉巴斯于1610年，危地马拉于1660年紧随其后。然而，美洲其他主要首都直到18世纪才开始印刷书籍，例如波哥大于1737年，布宜诺斯艾利斯于1780年（Quilis 1992: 46-7）。因此，尽管奇布查语在新格拉纳达被正式确立为通用语，但现存第一部语法书却不得不于1619年在马德里印刷出版。这对于这类外语技术出版物来说是一个严重的问题，因为作者远在重洋之外，无法校对校样中的错误，学习者自然很容易被误导。

15. La Paz (Bolivia) followed in 1610, Guatemala in 1660. Other major capitals in the Americas did not, however, begin to produce printed books until the eighteenth century, e.g. Bogotá in 1737, Buenos Aires in 1780 (Quilis 1992: 46-7). So for the Chibcha language, although it was officially constituted as the lengua general in New Granada, the first extant grammar had to be printed in Madrid in 1619. This was a serious problem for such technical publications in foreign languages, because the author, an ocean away from the printing house, would be unable to correct errors in the proofs, and the learners of course might well be misled by them.

16. Viñaza (1892)。这些可以与夏季语言学研究所对美洲不同语言数量的估计进行比较：888 种，其中 408 种在南美洲（Harmon 1995：26-7）。

16. Viñaza (1892). These could be compared with the Summer Institute for Linguistics’ estimate of the number of distinct languages in the Americas: 888, with 408 of them in South America (Harmon 1995: 26-7).

17. Rosenblat（1964：191）。

17. Rosenblat (1964: 191).

18. Sherzer（1993：251）。

18. Sherzer (1993: 251).

19. Lara（1989：99）。

19. Lara (1989: 99).

20. Lara (1971: 14) 提到了 1540 年 Pedro Aparicio 的手抄本（艺术、词汇、布道等……en quichua），并指出在1551 年出版的Relación del consilio Limense中，该语言被称为Quichua o General del Peru。

20. Lara (1971: 14) mentions a manuscript codex by Pedro Aparicio of 1540 (Arte, vocabulario, sermones etc…en quichua), and notes that in the Relación del consilio Limense, published in 1551, the language is referred to as Quichua o general del Peru.

21.塞隆-帕洛米诺（1987：35）。他在编年史家 Pedro Cieza de León (El señorío de los Incas , 1550), xxiv.119 和 Bernabé Cobo (Historia del Nuevo Mundo , 1653), xiv 的文字中找到了对此的支持。 1.235.

21. Cerrón-Palomino (1987: 35). He finds support for this in the words of the chroniclers Pedro Cieza de León (El señorío de los Incas, 1550), xxiv.119, and Bernabé Cobo (Historia del Nuevo Mundo, 1653), xiv. 1.235.

22.在本文中，我采纳了哈德曼（Hardman，1985）的观点。哈德曼毕生致力于研究这一领域，因此比大多数人更适合解读这段晦涩复杂的西班牙前历史。令人欣慰的是，塞隆-帕洛米诺（Cerrón-Palomino，1987：348）也倾向于认为克丘亚（Que-chua）起源于沿海地区。他们的主要灵感来源是阿尔弗雷多·托雷罗（Alfredo Torero，例如，1974）。

22. In this account, I follow Hardman (1985), an author whose lifetime of experience in the area makes her a better guide than most to this murky and complex area of pre-Hispanic history. It is reassuring that Cerrón-Palomino also comes down (1987: 348) in favour of a coastal origin for Que-chua. Their major inspiration is Alfredo Torero (e.g. 1974).

23. Blas Valera 神父的话，Inca Garcilaso 引用，Commentarios Reales，第一部分，vii.3。

23. Father Blas Valera’s words, quoted by Inca Garcilaso, Commentarios Reales, part I, vii.3.

24.同上，第一部分，vii.2。

24. ibid., part I, vii.2.

25.特里亚纳和安托维扎（1987：157）。

25. Triana y Antorveza (1987: 157).

26. Cieza de León，第 14 页。 296，引自 Triana y Antorveza (1987: 157)。

26. Cieza de León, p. 296, cited in Triana y Antorveza (1987: 157).

27.引自 Cadogan (1959)，Vanaya (1986:42) 引用。

27. From Cadogan (1959), quoted in Vanaya (1986:42).

28.出自 Godoy (1982)，引自 Vanaya (1986:51)。

28. From Godoy (1982), quoted in Vanaya (1986:51).

29. Vanaya（1986：6-7）。

29. Vanaya (1986: 6-7).

30.Arte y Grammatica muy copiosa de la lengua Aymara，卢多维科·贝尔托尼奥神父，耶稣会士（罗马，1603年）；Gramatica de la Lengua 将军 del Nuevo Reino，llamada Mosca，Fray Bernardo de Lugo 神父，多米尼加人（马德里，1619 年）；Arte, y Bocabulario de la lengua guarani，安东尼奥·鲁伊斯神父，耶稣会士（马德里，1640 年）。

30. Arte y Grammatica muy copiosa de la lengua Aymara, Father Ludovico Bertonio, Jesuit (Rome, 1603); Gramatica de la Lengua general del Nuevo Reino, llamada Mosca, Father Fray Bernardo de Lugo, Dominican (Madrid, 1619); Arte, y Bocabulario de la lengua guarani, Father Antonio Ruiz, Jesuit (Madrid, 1640).

31. Cuevas（1914：159）。

31. Cuevas (1914: 159).

32.穆尼奥斯收藏，卷。 86，下页。 54v.：'Somos muy pocos para enseñar la lengua de Castilla a indios。 Ellos no quieren habralla。 Mejor Sería Hacer General La Mexicana, que es Harto General y le tienen afición, y en ella hay escrito doctrina y 布道 y arte y vocabulario.'

32. Colleción Muñoz, vol. 86, fol. 54v.: ’Somos muy pocos para enseñar la lengua de Castilla a indios. Ellos no quieren hablalla. Mejor sería hacer general la mexicana, que es harto general y le tienen afición, y en ella hay escrito doctrina y sermones y arte y vocabulario.’

33. Inca Garcilaso 引述的 Blas Valera 神父的话，《Commentarios Reales》，第一部分，vii.3：“Si los españoles que son de ingenio muy agudo y muy sabios en ciencias, no pueden como ellos dicen, aprender la lengua General del Cuzco, ¿cómo se podrá hacer, que los indios no cultivados ni enseñados en letras aprendan la lengua Castellana？

33. Father Blas Valera’s words, quoted by Inca Garcilaso, Commentarios Reales, part I, vii.3: ‘Si los españoles que son de ingenio muy agudo y muy sabios en ciencias, no pueden como ellos dicen, aprender la lengua general del Cuzco, ¿cómo se podrá hacer, que los indios no cultivados ni enseñados en letras aprendan la lengua castellana?’

34.奎利斯（1992：64）；罗森布拉特（1964：194）。

34. Quilis (1992: 64); Rosenblat (1964: 194).

35.罗森布拉特（1964：193-5）；奎利斯（1992：55）。

35. Rosenblat (1964: 193-5); Quilis (1992: 55).

36. 1550 年 6 月 7 日，巴利亚多利德的卡洛斯五世致新西班牙总督，并抄录了一些变体给墨西哥所有多明我会、奥斯定会和方济各会省长，以及秘鲁总督和利马皇家法院（Rosenblat 1964: 206）。

36. Carlos V, Real Cédula of Valladolid, to the viceroy of New Spain, 7 June 1550, copied with some variants to all the Dominican, Augustinian and Franciscan provincials of Mexico, and to the viceroy of Peru and the Audiencia of Lima (Rosenblat 1964: 206).

37.引自 Triana y Antorveza (1987: 300)。“这个王国”，即格拉纳达新王国，原本应该以奇布查语为通用语，但显然大主教认为它不足以胜任他的使命。奇布查语可能从未在其最初占主导地位的区域之外使用过，而这仅占整个王国的一小部分。

37. Quoted in Triana y Antorveza (1987: 300). ‘This Kingdom’, the New Kingdom of Granada, was supposed have Chibcha as its lengua general, but evidently the archbishop found it inadequate for his mission. Probably it was never used beyond the original area of Chibcha dominance, a rather small part of the whole.

38.数据来自 Rosenblat (1964: 210-12)。据他所述，1810 年，混血人种占墨西哥人口的 27%。

38. Figures derived from Rosenblat (1964: 210-12). In 1810, according to him, mestizos would have made up 27 per cent of the Mexican population.

39.罗森布拉特（1964）引用了多明戈·德·阿尔梅达以查尔卡斯主教（位于秘鲁）的名义写的一封信，信中明确表示并未要求神父停止学习当地语言。

39. Rosenblat (1964) quotes a letter on these lines from Domingo de Almeida, writing in the name of the bishopric of Charcas (in Peru). It explicitly did not ask for priests to stop learning the natives’ languages.

40. Arthur JO Anderson，Psalmodia Christiana（盐湖城：犹他大学出版社，1993 年），第 14 页。 33.

40. Arthur J. O. Anderson, Psalmodia Christiana (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993), p. 33.

41.Motolinía（1990[1541]：i.15）。

41. Motolinía (1990 [1541]: i.15).

42.莱昂-波蒂利亚（1992：301）。

42. León-Portilla (1992: 301).

43.跨。 Frances Karttunen 和 Gilka Wara Céspedes，特拉洛坎，卷。 ix (1982)，第 119-27 页。

43. Trans. Frances Karttunen and Gilka Wara Céspedes, Tlalocan, vol. ix (1982), pp. 119-27.

44.弗朗西斯科·梅西埃·古斯曼神父， 1765 年 7 月大斋节星期五的布道词。引自 Albó 和 Layme (1992: 40-1)。

44. Father Francisco Mercier y Guzman, Sermon for Friday of Lent, July 1765. Quoted in Albó and Layme (1992: 40-1).

45. Dietrich (1995: 289)；Tovar (1964: 249)。Tovar 为货币词提供了不同的词源解释，即cua repotí，“渣滓”。

45. Dietrich (1995: 289); Tovar (1964: 249). Tovar offers a different etymology for the money word, as cua repotí, ‘piece of dross’.

46. 'Una muy buena cosa aconteció a un clérigo recién venido de Castilla, que no podía creer los indios sabían la doctrina cristiana, ni Pater Noster, ni Credo bien dicho; y como otros españoles le dijesen que sí, él todavia incrédulo;你是大学里的学生们的学生，是其他印度人的教士笔下的人，是你的父亲，你的父亲，你的信仰，你的信仰，你的信仰，你的信仰好的； y el clérigo acusóle una palabra que el indio bien decía, y como el indio se afirmase en que decía bien, y el clérigo que no, tuvo el estudiante necesidad de probar cómo decía bien, y preguntóle hablando en latin: Reverende Pater, cujus casus est？ Entonces como el clérigo no super gramática, quedó confuso y atajado' (Motolinía 1990 [1541]: iii.12.389)。

46. ’Una muy buena cosa aconteció a un clérigo recién venido de Castilla, que no podía creer que los indios sabían la doctrina cristiana, ni Pater Noster, ni Credo bien dicho; y como otros españoles le dijesen que sí, él todavía incrédulo; y a esta sazón habían salido dos estudiantes del colegio, y el clérigo pensando que eran de los otros indios, preguntó a uno si sabía el Pater Noster y dijo que sí, e hízosele decir, y después hízole decir el Credo, y díjole bien; y el clérigo acusóle una palabra que el indio bien decía, y como el indio se afirmase en que decía bien, y el clérigo que no, tuvo el estudiante necesidad de probar cómo decía bien, y preguntóle hablando en latín: Reverende Pater, cujus casus est? Entonces como el clérigo no supiera gramática, quedó confuso y atajado’ (Motolinía 1990 [1541]: iii.12.389).

47.拉斯特拉和霍卡西塔斯（1983：267）；奎利斯（1992：44）。

47. Lastra and Horcasitas (1983:267); Quilis (1992:44).

48.塞隆-帕洛米诺（1987：343-4）。

48. Cerrón-Palomino (1987: 343-4).

49.同上：346、67-75。

49. ibid.: 346, 67-75.

50. 'Los ministros eclesiásticos que no procuran adelantar y Extender el idiomacastellano y cuidar que los indios sepan leer y escriber en él, dejÁndolos cerrados en su nativo idioma, son en mi Concepto, enemigos declarados del bien de los Naturales, de su Policía y racionalidad…'《Cartas patorales y edictos》，墨西哥，1770 年，第 17 页。 47.

50. ’Los ministros eclesiásticos que no procuran adelantar y extender el idioma castellano y cuidar que los indios sepan leer y escriber en él, dejÁndolos cerrados en su nativo idioma, son en mi concepto, enemigos declarados del bien de los naturales, de su policía y racionalidad…’ Cartas pastorales y edictos, Mexico, 1770, p. 47.

51. Rosenblat（1964：210）。

51. Rosenblat (1964: 210).

52. Lorenzana，《Cartas patorales y edictos》，墨西哥，1770 年，引自 Triana y Antorveza (1987: 504)。

52. Lorenzana, Cartas pastorales y edictos, Mexico, 1770, quoted in Triana y Antorveza (1987: 504).

53.马特奥斯副手于 1910 年发表的讲话，引自 King (1994: 58)。

53. Deputy Mateos in 1910, quoted in King (1994: 58).

54. José María Morelos，《民族情感》，引自 King (1994: 57) 的英文译本。

54. José María Morelos, Sentiments of the Nation, quoted in English translation in King (1994: 57).

55. King（1994：59）。

55. King (1994: 59).

56. Rosenblat（1964：212）。

56. Rosenblat (1964: 212).

57. Grimes（2000：100）。

57. Grimes (2000: 100).

58. Rosenblat（1964：214）。

58. Rosenblat (1964: 214).

59. Rubin（1985：111-12）。

59. Rubin (1985: 111-12).

60. Grimes（1996：115）。

60. Grimes (1996: 115).

61. Quilis（1992：46）。

61. Quilis (1992: 46).

62.同上：79-80。

62. ibid.: 79-80.

63.同上：82。

63. ibid.: 82.

11 帝国列车：欧洲的海外语言

11 In the Train of Empire: Europe’s Languages Abroad

1.奥利维拉·马克斯（1972：343）。

1. Oliveira Marques (1972: 343).

2. Anquetil du Perron（伊朗《Zend Avesta》的第一位译者），《Recherches historiques et géographiques sur l'Inde》，卷。 ii，第 xii-xiii 页，引自 Lopes (1936: 60)。

2. Anquetil du Perron (first translator of the Iranian Zend Avesta), in Recherches historiques et géographiques sur l’Inde, vol. ii, pp. xii-xiii, quoted in Lopes (1936: 60).

3. Santarém (1958 [1841])，以及《国家传记辞典》，sv Wyndham, Thomas（简明版，第 2343 页）。

3. Santarém (1958 [1841]), and Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. Wyndham, Thomas (compact edn, p. 2343).

4. Samuel Purchas，《Purchas His Pilgrimes》，第二卷，第 345 页（格拉斯哥 1905 年 [1625 年]），引自 Lopes（1936 年：32）。

4. Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, ii, p. 345 (Glasgow 1905 [1625]), quoted in Lopes (1936: 32).

5.曼德尔斯洛，《航行中的著名航行和印度东方航行》，第 14 页。 33（阿姆斯特丹，1727 年），引自 Lopes（1936：38）。

5. Mandelslo, Voyages célèbres et remarquables faits de Perse aux Indes Orientales, p. 33 (Amsterdam, 1727), quoted in Lopes (1936: 38).

6. Peregrinaçáo，xci（里斯本，1614 年），引用于 Tarracha Ferreira（1992：432-3）。

6. Peregrinaçáo, xci (Lisbon, 1614), quoted in Tarracha Ferreira (1992:432-3).

7.这段文字出自1698年荷兰联合东印度公司（VOC）的宪章，由弗兰克·彭尼牧师引述。

7. This is from the Charter of the VOC (the Dutch United East India Company) of 1698, quoted by Revd Frank Penny,

《马德拉斯的教会》，第一卷，第 190-2 页（伦敦，1904 年），并由 Lopes 于 1936 年出版（1936 年：47）。

The Church in Madras, vol. i, pp. 190-2 (London, 1904), and thence by Lopes (1936:47).

8. Jean Brun，《La veritable Religion des Hollandais》（阿姆斯特丹，1675 年），第 14 页。 267，引自洛佩斯（1936：48）。

8. Jean Brun, La véritable Religion des Hollandais (Amsterdam, 1675), p. 267, quoted in Lopes (1936: 48).

9. François Valentijn，《Oud en nieuw Oost-Indien》（阿姆斯特丹，1724-6），引自 Lopes（1936：48）。

9. François Valentijn, Oud en nieuw Oost-Indien (Amsterdam, 1724-6), quoted in Lopes (1936: 48).

10.巴斯克斯·奎斯塔和门德斯·达·卢斯（1971：151）。

10. Vásquez Cuesta and Mendes da Luz (1971: 151).

11. Grimes（2000）。

11. Grimes (2000).

12. Barraclough（1978：166）。

12. Barraclough (1978: 166).

13.安东尼奥·维埃拉神父，《圣灵的布道》（波尔图，1683 年），引自 Tarracha Ferreira（1992 年：480-4）。

13. Father Antonio Vieira, Sermon of the Holy Spirit (Oporto, 1683), quoted in Tarracha Ferreira (1992: 480-4).

14. Fernáo Cardim，Tratados da terra e gente do Brasil，第 14 页。 121，引自 Johnson 和 Nizza da Silva (1992: 481)。圣维森特位于巴西南部海岸，靠近圣保罗。

14. Fernáo Cardim, Tratados da terra e gente do Brasil, p. 121, quoted in Johnson and Nizza da Silva (1992: 481). Sao Vicente is on the southern coast of Brazil, near Sáo Paulo.

15. Grimes (2000)。据估计，目前使用图皮南巴语（现称恩亨加图语）的人数只有五千人，图皮南巴语是古老的通用语言。

15. Grimes (2000). The estimate for current speakers of Tupinambá (now known as Nhengatu), the old língua geral, is just five thousand.

16.以色列（1995：321）。

16. Israel (1995: 321).

17. Nauwkeurige beschryving van de Guinese Goud-, Tand- en Slave-Kust (阿姆斯特丹, 1704), 引自 Boxer (1969: 106)。

17. Nauwkeurige beschryving van de Guinese Goud-, Tand- en Slave-Kust (Amsterdam, 1704), quoted in Boxer (1969: 106).

18. Grimes（2000）。

18. Grimes (2000).

19.以色列（1995：941）。

19. Israel (1995: 941).

20. François Valentijn，Oud en nieuw Oost-Indien，iii，1，第 35-44 页（阿姆斯特丹，1724-6），引自 Hoffman（1979：66）。

20. François Valentijn, Oud en nieuw Oost-Indien, iii, 1, pp. 35-44 (Amsterdam, 1724-6), quoted in Hoffman (1979: 66).

21. Hoffman（1979：66-8）。

21. Hoffman (1979: 66-8).

22.同上：70。

22. ibid.: 70.

23. 1813 年 4 月 24 日在巴达维亚举行的艺术与科学学会会议上发表的讲话…Verhandelingen van het [Koninklijk] Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen , 7, 巴达维亚, 1814 年，第 23 页13. 引用霍夫曼 (1979: 73)。

23. Discourse delivered at a Meeting of the Society of Arts and Sciences in Batavia, on 24th day of April 1813 …Verhandelingen van het [Koninklijk] Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, 7, Batavia, 1814, p. 13. Quoted in Hoffman (1979: 73).

24. Hoffman（1979：74-5）。

24. Hoffman (1979: 74-5).

25. Bijblad op het Staatsblad van Nederlandsch-Indië，1904 年，第 25 期。 5821，第 78-9 页； Charles Adriaan van Ophuijsen，Maleische Spraakkunst，莱顿，1910。Hoffman (1979: 87-92) 中描述了上下文。它于 1947 年和 1972 年进行了改革，消除了与马来西亚使用的拼写的大部分差异。

25. Bijblad op het Staatsblad van Nederlandsch-Indië, 1904, no. 5821, pp. 78-9; Charles Adriaan van Ophuijsen, Maleische Spraakkunst, Leiden, 1910. The context is described in Hoffman (1979: 87-92). It was reformed in 1947 and 1972, ironing out most differences with the spelling used in Malaysia.

26.让，在他的波伊提乌斯译本中。他实际上是奥尔良附近默恩河畔卢瓦尔的本地人。

26. Jean, in his translation of Boethius. He was in fact a native of Meun-sur-Loire, near Orléans.

27. Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterěts，艺术。 111：“Et pour ce que Telles selects sont souventes fois advenues sur l'intelligence des mots latin contenuz esd”。逮捕，nous voulons que doresnavant tout parkingz，ensemble toutes autres procedure，soient de noz Courtz souveraines ou autres subalternes et inférieurs，soient des registres，enquestes，contractz，commissions，句子，testamens et autres qielzconques actes et exploictz de Justice ou qui en deppenden，soient prononcez， enregistrez et delivrez aux party en langage maternel fronçois et non autrement。

27. Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterěts, Art. 111: ’Et pour ce que telles choses sont souventes fois advenues sur l’intelligence des mots latins contenuz esd. arrestz, nous voulons que doresnavant tout arrestz, ensemble toutes autres procedures, soient de noz courtz souveraines ou autres subalternes et inférieurs, soient des registres, enquestes, contractz, commissions, sentences, testamens et autres qielzconques actes et exploictz de justice ou qui en deppenden, soient prononcez, enregistrez et delivrez aux parties en langage maternel fronçois et non autrement.’

28. Picoche 和 Marchello-Nizia (1989: 29)。

28. Picoche and Marchello-Nizia (1989: 29).

29.乔叟，《坎特伯雷故事集》序言，11. 124-6。

29. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 11. 124-6.

30.引自 Picoche 和 Marchello-Nizia (1989: 143)。

30. Quoted in Picoche and Marchello-Nizia (1989: 143).

31.笛卡尔，《方法论，三人组》：'suivant les ideas les plus modérées et les plus éloignées de l'excès qui fussent communément reçues en pratique par les mieux sensés de ceux avec lesquels j'aurais à vivre…tšcher toujours plutôt à me vaincre que la Fortune, et changer me désirs que l'ordre du monde ……”

31. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, troisième partie: ’suivant les opinions les plus modérées et les plus éloignées de l’excès qui fussent communément reçues en pratique par les mieux sensés de ceux avec lesquels j’aurais à vivre…tšcher toujours plutôt à me vaincre que la fortune, et changer mes désirs que l’ordre du monde …’

32.同上，四部分：“je jugeai que je pouvais prendre pour règle générale que les Chooses que nous concevons fort clairement et fort disdisement sont toutes vraies …”

32. ibid., quatrième partie: ’je jugeai que je pouvais prendre pour règle générale que les choses que nous concevons fort clairement et fort distinctement sont toutes vraies …’

33. Picoche 和 Marchello-Nizia (1989: 154)。

33. Picoche and Marchello-Nizia (1989: 154).

34.同上：150。

34. ibid.: 150.

35.勒克莱尔 (2001：《新法兰西（1534-1760）》，第 2、4 页) 估计，1663 年法国人约有 2500 人，而早在 1627 年，英国人就有 80000 人，荷兰人就有 10000 人。1754 年，他的数字是 69000 名法国人（新法兰西 55000 人，阿卡迪亚 10000 人，路易斯安那 4000 人），而英国殖民者有 100 万，还有 30 万奴隶。

35. Leclerc (2001: La Nouvelle-France (1534-1760), pp. 2,4) gives an estimate of about 2500 French in 1663, as against 80,000 English and 10,000 Dutch even in 1627. In 1754, his figures are 69,000 French (55,000 in Nouvelle-France, 10,000 in Acadie, and 4000 in Louisiane) against 1 million English colonists with their 300,000 slaves.

36. ' Colbert qui rěvait de voir ces indigenes et ces Français de la Nouvelle-France ne previous «qu'un mesme peuple et un mesme sang», se plaint à Talon en 1666 qu'on n'ait pas obligé les sauvages à «s'instruire dans notre langue, au lieu que Dorion 和 Morissonneau (1992)认为，法国的商业活动是必要的。

36. ‘Colbert qui rěvait de voir ces indigenes et ces Français de la Nouvelle-France ne former «qu’un mesme peuple et un mesme sang», se plaint à Talon en 1666 qu’on n’ait pas obligé les sauvages à «s’instruire dans notre langue, au lieu que pour avoir quelque commerce avec eux nos français ont été nécessités d’apprendre la leur»’ Dorion and Morissonneau (1992).

37.他是 Le Sieur de Bacqueville et de La Potherie，他实际上写道：“On y parle ici parfaitement bien sans mauvais 口音”。 Quoiqu'il y ait un mélange de presque toutes les heavens de France, on ne saurait distinguer le parler d'aucune dans les canadiennes' (Leclerc 2001: La Nouvelle-France (1534-1760) , pp. 4, 5)。

37. He was Le Sieur de Bacqueville et de La Potherie, and he actually wrote: ’On y parle ici parfaitement bien sans mauvais accent. Quoiqu’il y ait un mélange de presque toutes les provinces de France, on ne saurait distinguer le parler d’aucune dans les canadiennes’ (Leclerc 2001: La Nouvelle-France (1534-1760), pp. 4, 5).

38. “Les paysans canadiens parlent très bien le français”（Leclerc 2001：La Nouvelle-France (1534-1760)，第 9 页）。

38. ’Les paysans canadiens parlent très bien le français’ (Leclerc 2001: La Nouvelle-France (1534-1760), p. 9).

39. Barraclough（1978：208）。

39. Barraclough (1978: 208).

40. Picoche 和 Marchello-Nizia (1989: 64)。

40. Picoche and Marchello-Nizia (1989: 64).

41.格莱姆斯（2000）。本地治里的数字来自勒克莱尔 (2001, Les États où le français est langue officielle ou coofficielle , <www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/Langues/2vital inter francaisTABLO.htm>)。

41. Grimes (2000). The figure for Pondicherry comes from Leclerc (2001, Les États où le français est langue officielle ou coofficielle, <www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/Langues/2vital inter francaisTABLO.htm>).

42.对他们来说不幸的是，穆斯林人口在同一时期也以类似的速度增长，从 200 万增长到 870 万（Picoche 和 Marchello-Nizia 1989：86、104）。

42. Unfortunately for them, the Muslim majority was also growing at a comparable rate, from 2 to 8.7 million in the same period (Picoche and Marchello-Nizia 1989: 86, 104).

43.陀思妥耶夫斯基，《全集》第21卷，1880-81年作家日记，第3卷，第517-518页。此处的西里尔字母拼写未进行现代化处理。这段文字是对俄罗斯在格克特佩（“蓝山”）战胜土库曼人的著名胜利的回应，寇松勋爵也对此评论道：“格克特佩这样一场大屠杀的恐怖影响将持续数代” （《1889年俄罗斯在中亚与英俄问题》，伦敦：弗兰克·卡斯出版社，1967年，第386页）。

43. F. M. Dostoyevsky, Collected Works, vol. 21, in Writers Diary for 1880-81, iii, pp. 517-18. The Cyrillic spelling has not been modernised. These words were written in reaction to a celebrated Russian victory over the Turkmens at Gök Tepe (’Blue Hill’), on which Lord Curzon also commented: ‘The terrifying effect of such a massacre as Geok Tepe survives for generations’ (Russia in Central Asia in 1889 and the Anglo-Russian Question, London: Frank Cass, 1967, p. 386).

44. Hosking（1997：5-6）。

44. Hosking (1997: 5-6).

45.同上：379。

45. ibid.: 379.

46.同上：369。

46. ibid.: 369.

47. Lieven（2000：334）。

47. Lieven (2000: 334).

48. Hosking (1997: 18)：Rostislav Fadeyev 将军，第 60 号 第比利斯 1860 年，第 17 页。 9.

48. Hosking (1997: 18): Gen. Rostislav Fadeyev, 60 Tbilisi 1860, p. 9.

49.这些数据是根据 Grimes (2000) 的数据计算得出的。显然，俄语在这些国家非常普及，并被广泛用作第二语言（例如，Grimes 引用亚美尼亚的数据为 30%）。

49. These figures are calculated from those in Grimes (2000). Evidently, Russian is very widely known and used as a second language in these countries (e.g. Grimes quotes 30 per cent for Armenia).

50. Roy（2000：30-31）。

50. Roy (2000: 30-31).

51.同上：32。

51. ibid.: 32.

52.该数字是根据 Grimes (2000) 中的数据计算得出的。

52. This figure is calculated from those in Grimes (2000).

53.该数字是根据同上的数据计算得出的。

53. This figure is calculated from those in ibid.

54.大祭司阿瓦库姆，引自霍斯金（1997:69）。

54. Archpriest Avvakum, quoted in Hosking (1997:69).

55. Lieven（2000：255、435、278 和 437）；他主要依赖于 Gudrun Persson 1999 年在伦敦大学获得的博士论文：《俄罗斯军队和对外战争 1859-1871》。

55. Lieven (2000: 255, 435, 278 and 437); he relies strongly on Gudrun Persson’s 1999 London University PhD thesis: The Russian Army and Foreign Wars 1859-1871.

56. Hosking（1997：187）。

56. Hosking (1997: 187).

57.同上：36，引用 Erik Amburger，Geschichte der Behördenorganise Russlands von Peter dem Grossen bis 1917，1966，第 502-19 页，以及 Walter Laqueur，俄罗斯和德国，1965 年，第 40-1 页。

57. ibid.: 36, quoting Erik Amburger, Geschichte der Behördenorganisation Russlands von Peter dem Grossen bis 1917, 1966, pp. 502-19, and Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany, 1965, pp. 40-1.

58. Hosking（1997：309-10）。

58. Hosking (1997: 309-10).

59.同上：402；Comrie（1981：28）。

59. ibid.: 402; Comrie (1981: 28).

60. Hosking (1997: 311) 引用 Jeffrey Brooks 的《当俄罗斯学会阅读时：文学和流行文化》，1985 年。

60. Hosking (1997: 311), quoting Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia learnt to read: literary and popular culture, 1985.

61. Fisher（1978：100-4）。

61. Fisher (1978: 100-4).

62. Comrie（1981：28）。

62. Comrie (1981: 28).

63.同上：1。

63. ibid.: 1.

64. MI Isayev，《苏联的民族语言：问题与解决方案》，1977 年，第 300-1 页，引自 Comrie（1981 年：36-7）。

64. M. I. Isayev, National Languages in the USSR: Problems and solutions, 1977, pp. 300-1, quoted in Comrie (1981: 36-7).

65. Roy（2000：169）。

65. Roy (2000: 169).

66. Barraclough（1978：140）。

66. Barraclough (1978: 140).

67. Tsurumi（1984：277）。

67. Tsurumi (1984:277).

68. Chen (1984: 242)，引用 Ken'ichi Kondō (ed.)，Taiheiyō senka no Chōsen oyobi Taiwan，“太平洋战争期间的韩国和台湾”，东京，1961 年。

68. Chen (1984: 242), quoting Ken’ichi Kondō (ed.), Taiheiyō senka no Chōsen oyobi Taiwan, ‘Korea and Taiwan during the Pacific War’, Tokyo, 1961.

69. Tsurumi（1984：303），释义 Aoyagi Tsunatarō Keijō（首尔），Shin Chōsen，“新韩国”，1925 年。

69. Tsurumi (1984: 303), paraphrasing Aoyagi Tsunatarō Keijō (Seoul), Shin Chōsen, ‘New Korea’, 1925.

70.参见宫胁（2002）：他注意到密克罗尼西亚的一对夫妇仍然使用日语作为一种方便的交流方式，而他们的孩子却听不懂。

70. See Miyawaki (2002): he notes a married couple in Micronesia, still using Japanese as a convenient means of communication that their children will not understand.

12 微观世界还是扭曲的镜子？英语的职业生涯

12 Microcosm or Distorting Mirror? The Career of English

1. T.S.艾略特，《四个四重奏》（1942），《小吉丁》，第2部分。

1. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1942), ‘Little Gidding’, part 2.

2. Brandt（1969：374）。

2. Brandt (1969: 374).

3. Smith（2000：164）。

3. Smith (2000: 164).

4. Crowley (2000: 15)。原文诺曼法语为：'III. Item ordine est et establie que chescun Engleys use la lang Engleis et soit nome par nom Engleys Enterlessant oulterment la manere de nomere use par Irroies et que chescun Engleys use la manere guise monture et appareill Engleys solonc son estat et si nul Engleys ou Irroies [conversant英格兰使用la lang Irroies] entre euxmesmes encontre cestordinance et de ceo soit atteint soint sez terrez et tentz sil eit seisiz en les Maines son Seinours direct tanque qil veigne a un des place nostre Seignour le Roy et trove certain seurtee de prendre et user la lang Engleis…et辅助阙在英语会话中使用英语的受益者和日常事务中的问题迈克尔·普罗钦 (Michael prochin) 降临。

4. Crowley (2000: 15). The original Norman French reads: ’III. Item ordine est et establie que chescun Engleys use la lang Engleis et soit nome par nom Engleys enterlessant oulterment la manere de nomere use par Irroies et que chescun Engleys use la manere guise monture et appareill Engleys solonc son estat et si nul Engleys ou Irroies [conversant entre Engleys use la lang Irroies] entre euxmesmes encontre cest ordinance et de ceo soit atteint soint sez terrez et tentz sil eit seisiz en les maines son Seinours immediate tanque qil veigne a un des places nostre Seignour le Roy et trove sufficient seurtee de prendre et user la lang Engleis…et auxiant que les beneficers de seint Esglise conversantz entre Anglois use la langue Engleis et sils ne facent eint leur ordinaries les issues de leur benefices tanque ils usent la langue Angloise en le maniere susdit et eient respit de la langue Engloise apprendre et de celles purvier entre cy et le feste seint Michael prochin avent.’

5. 1536 年联合法案第十七条，引自 Evans (1992: 298)。

5. Act of Union 1536, section xvii, as quoted in Evans (1992: 298).

6. SPHen. VIII 致戈尔韦镇，1536 年，引自 Evans (1992: 296)。

6. S.P.Hen. VIII to the Town of Galway, 1536, as quoted in Evans (1992: 296).

7. Crowley（2000：19）。

7. Crowley (2000: 19).

8.亨利三世公告，1258 年 10 月 18 日；专利卷宗，42 Henry III m. 1，n. 1，伦敦公共记录办公室；如 Mossé (1962: 234) 中所述。

8. Proclamation of Henry III, 18 October 1258; Patent Rolls, 42 Henry III m. 1, n. 1, Public Record Office, London; as reproduced in Mossé (1962: 234).

9.特雷维萨重新。Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden，i，59。文本以 William Caxton 于 1482 年出版的（伦敦）形式给出，因为这比特雷维萨自己的康沃尔方言更容易阅读。标点符号和大小写也进行了调整，以便于现代阅读。希格登的相关言论是：“Haec quidem nativae linguae Corruptio Pronit hodie multum ex duobus”；视频中的普埃里在学校里反对民族国家的第一次诺曼诺姆冒险，违背了普通人的固有观念，解释了加利斯的强制行为； item quod filii nobilium ab ipsis cunabulorum crepundiis ad Gallicum idioma informantur。 Quibus profecto农村人assimilari volentes, ut per hoc spectabiliores videantur, francigenare satagunt omninisu。

9. Trevisa re. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, i, 59. The text is given in the (London) form published by William Caxton in 1482, since this is substantially easier to read than Trevisa’s own Cornish dialect. The punctuation and capitalisation are also adjusted for ease of modern reading. The relevant words of Higden are: ’Haec quidem nativae linguae corruptio provenit hodie multum ex duobus; quod videlicet pueri in scholis contra morem caeterarum nationum a primo Normannorum adventu, derelicto proprio vulgari construere Gallice compelluntur; item quod filii nobilium ab ipsis cunabulorum crepundiis ad Gallicum idioma informantur. Quibus profecto rurales homines assimilari volentes, ut per hoc spectabiliores videantur, francigenare satagunt omni nisu.’

10. Cursor Mundi，《圣母升天》，II.51-4。

10. Cursor Mundi, Assumption of Our Lady, II.51-4.

11.乔叟，《特洛伊罗斯与克瑞西达》，第五卷，第二章，1793-9。

11. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseide, v, **II. 1793-9.

12.出自威廉·卡克斯顿， 《埃尼多斯序言》，1490 年。

12. From William Caxton, Prologue to Eneydos, 1490.

13.最著名的是 Johann Clajus，Grammatica Germanicae linguae…ex Bibliis Lutheri Germanicis et aliis ejus libris Collecta，莱比锡，1578。最后两段在很大程度上依赖于 Febvre 和 Martin (1958: 481-91)。

13. The most celebrated was Johann Clajus, Grammatica Germanicae linguae…ex Bibliis Lutheri Germanicis et aliis ejus libris collecta, Leipzig, 1578. These last two paragraphs are heavily dependent on Febvre and Martin (1958: 481-91).

14.他们在尼科尔森（2003：247-50）的著作中被列出，与他们的许多欧洲大陆同时代的人一起，从 1488 年捷克语的第一本印刷圣经开始。

14. They are listed in Nicolson (2003: 247-50), along with many of their Continental contemporaries, starting with the first printed Bible in Czech in 1488.

15.到17世纪20年代，所有乡绅都能识字。到17世纪40年代，45%的自耕农和大约5%的劳动者也能识字。男性的识字率高于女性，伦敦的识字率高于外省（Nicolson 2003: 122）。

15. By the 1620s, all the gentry could read. By the 1640s, so could 45 per cent of the yeomanry, and perhaps 5 per cent of labourers. Literacy was higher among men than women, and in London than in the provinces (Nicolson 2003: 122).

16.约翰·西利爵士，《英格兰的扩张》，第一讲。

16. Sir John Seeley, The Expansion of England, Lecture I.

17.凯恩斯（1930：156-7）。

17. Keynes (1930: 156-7).

18. Ferguson（2003：11）。

18. Ferguson (2003: 11).

19.同上：13。

19. ibid.: 13.

20.威廉姆斯（1643年：第一、六、八章）。全书名为：《美洲语言入门，或新英格兰地区土著语言指南。附有对上述土著居民在和平与战争、生与死中的风俗、礼仪、宗教信仰等的简要观察。此外，还附有作者的总体和个别精神见解，对居住在这些地区的英国人尤为重要（适用于任何场合）；同时也能使所有人受益匪浅。》作者因其自由主义观点而被马萨诸塞州驱逐，但后来建立了罗德岛州的普罗维登斯市。

20. Williams (1643: chs i, vi, viii). The full title is: ‘A Key into the Language of America, or An help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America called New England. Together with brief Observations of the Customes, Manners and Worships, &c of the aforesaid Natives, in Peace and Warre, in Life and Death. On all of which are added Spirituall Observations, Generall and Particular, of the Authour, of chiefe and speciall use (upon all occasions,) to all the English Inhabiting those parts; yet pleasant and profitable to the view of all men.’ The author was expelled from Massachusetts for his liberal opinions, but went on to found Providence, Rhode Island.

21. Williams（1643 年：第 3 章和第 17 章）。

21. Williams (1643: chs iii and xvii).

22.示例源自 Silver 和 Miller (1997: 319)。那里提到的 Penobscot 是 Abenaki 的一个变体。

22. Examples derived from Silver and Miller (1997: 319). Penobscot, referred to there, is a variety of Abenaki.

23.艾略特（1666）。尽管这是一部形式语法著作，但它也并不放过任何改进意见的机会，例如第7段：“因此，这句至理名言说得好：基督徒必须像形容词一样多地运用副词来装饰自己；他不仅要行善，更要成为良善的人。当一个人的美德行为被副词充分修饰时，每个人都会得出结论：这个人本身就充满了美德的形容词。”

23. Eliot (1666). Although a formal grammar, it does not pass up the odd opportunity for improving comments, e.g. p. 7: ‘And hence is that wise Saying, That a Christian must be adorned with as many Adverbs as Adjectives: He must as well do good, as be good. When a man’s virtuous Actions are well adorned with Adverbs, every one will conclude that the man is well adorned with virtuous Adjectives.’

24.艾略特 (1663)：这是美洲第一部圣经译本，尽管西班牙人自 1539 年以来就以美洲语言出版祈祷文和忏悔录，但他们对基督教采取了天主教的态度。参见第 10 章，“语言障碍的第一个裂缝：译员、双语者、语法学家”，第 341 页。

24. Eliot (1663): this has the distinction of being the first translation of the Bible in the Americas, although the Spanish, with their Catholic approach to Christianity, had been publishing prayers and confessionals in American languages since 1539. See Chapter 10, ‘First chinks in the language barrier: Interpreters, bilinguals, grammarians’, p. 341.

25. Cotton Mather (1663-1728)，引自 Bailey (1992: 73)（间接引用）。

25. Cotton Mather (1663-1728), quoted in (indirectly) Bailey (1992: 73).

26. Barraclough（1978：221）。

26. Barraclough (1978: 221).

27.与墨西哥的边界稍晚一些才最终确定，即 1853 年的加兹登购地案，该案将南部的一小部分添加到现代的亚利桑那州和新墨西哥州，以便为南太平洋铁路开辟一条新路线。

27. The border with Mexico was finalised a little later, by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, which added a southern sliver to the modern states of Arizona and New Mexico to field a new route for the Southern Pacific Railroad.

28.引自 Milner 等人 (1994:168)。1848 年 1 月，加利福尼亚州北部萨特磨坊发现金矿，引发了举世闻名的淘金热，这立即巩固了美国对西部地区的占领。由此带来的人口激增，使加利福尼亚州仅用了两年时间就完成了建州手续，创下了新的纪录。

28. Quoted in Milner et al. (1994:168). The acquisition of the west was immediately cemented by the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in northern California in January 1848, and the world’s most famous gold rush. The resulting jump in population accelerated California’s acquisition of statehood to a period of two years, a new record.

29.引自同上：146。

29. Quoted in ibid.: 146.

30.引自 Sharon Gangitano，《印度语言》（<www.sonoma.edu/depts/amcs/upstream/Indian.html>）。

30. Quoted in Sharon Gangitano, Indian Language (<www.sonoma.edu/depts/amcs/upstream/Indian.html>).

31.美国人口普查局，引自 Wright (2000: 266)。

31. US Census Bureau, quoted in Wright (2000: 266).

32.美国人口普查局 1989 年、1994 年，引自 Crawford (1998)。

32. US Census Bureau 1989, 1994, quoted in Crawford (1998).

33. Slate（2001：391）。

33. Slate (2001: 391).

34. M. Austin 的旅程备忘录，1796-1797 年，《美国历史评论》，第 5 卷，第 518-42 页。

34. Memorandum of M. Austin’s Journey, 1796-1797, Amer. Hist. Rev., v, pp. 518-42.

35. Welling (2001)。

35. Welling (2001).

36.美国人口普查局，引自 Wright (2000:490)；各州人口也一样，第 169-201 页。

36. US Census Bureau, quoted in Wright (2000:490); state populations likewise, pp. 169-201.

37. Gholam Hossein Khan（1902 [1789]：iii，191-2）。

37.Gholam Hossein Khan (1902 [1789]: iii, 191-2).

38.托马斯·巴宾顿·麦考利，《1835年2月2日关于印度教育的备忘录》，1835年（转载于杨格1957年版：721-4页）。尽管这是英国文化沙文主义的一个特别恶劣的例子，并且在印度梵语教育的撤回中发挥了重要作用，但麦考利并非仅仅考虑英国自身的文化，而是认为英语能够（必要时通过已翻译的文本）提供接触世界文化各个方面的途径。然而，他轻率地断言印度人可以忽视自身的传统，这恰恰是成功的帝国主义滋生的那种文化过度自信的典型体现。

38. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education, 1835 (reprinted in Young 1957: 721-4). Although this a particularly pernicious example of cultural chauvinism on behalf of English, and played a major role in the withdrawal of support for Sanskrit education in India, Macaulay was thinking not of English’s own culture exclusively but rather of his belief that English could provide access (where necessary, through texts already translated) to every aspect of world culture. But his easy assurance that Indians could afford to neglect their own traditions is a monument to the kind of cultural overconfidence bred by successful imperialism.

39. JJ Campos，《葡萄牙人在孟加拉的历史》，1919 年，第 173 页，引自 Sinha (1978:3)。

39. J. J. Campos, The History of the Portuguese in Bengal, 1919, p. 173, cited in Sinha (1978:3).

40. Holden Furber，《十八世纪中叶的孟买管辖区》，1965年，第2页，引自Sinha（1978年：6）。

40. Holden Furber, Bombay Presidency in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, 1965, p. 2, cited in Sinha (1978: 6).

41.波利耶 (2001)。这部作品的标题颇具特色，名为《阿尔萨兰的奇迹》（I'jāz-i Arsalānī ），暗指作者自己的波斯语称号“阿尔萨兰·伊·江”（Arsalān-i-Jang），意为“战狮”，此称号由莫卧儿皇帝沙阿·阿拉姆亲自授予（第9页）。现代译者在导言（第70页）中指出，波利耶以经典的手法处理了他两位印度妻子之间的争端：他威胁其中一位岳母，同时利用她对女儿的羞耻心来达到目的。1788年返回法国后，波利耶又娶了第三位妻子。

41. Polier (2001). Characteristically, the work is called I’jāz-i Arsalānī, the ‘wonderment of Arsalān’, alluding to the author’s own Persianate title, Arsalān-i-Jang, ‘lion of battle’, bestowed by the Mughal emperor Shah Alam himself (p. 9). In their Introduction, p. 70, the modern translators point out Polier’s classic approach to a dispute between his two Indian wives, threatening one mother-in-law while appealing to her sense of shame for her daughter. Polier went on to marry a third wife after his return to France in 1788.

42. SN Mukherjee，《印度教育史》，1961 年，第 30 页，引自 Sinha (1978: 27)。

42. S. N. Mukherjee, History of Education in India, 1961, p. 30, cited in Sinha (1978: 27).

43. Ingram（1969：235-6）。

43. Ingram (1969: 235-6).

44. Sinha（1978：28）。

44. Sinha (1978: 28).

45. “所有大臣必须在抵达后一年内学习葡萄牙语，并努力学习他们居住国的母语，以便更好地向公司或其代理人的仆人或奴隶——印度人——传授新教信仰”（JW Kaye，《东印度公司管理》，1853 年，第 626 页，引自 Sinha (1978: 10)。

45. ‘All Ministers shall be obliged to learn within one year after their arrival the Portuguese language and shall apply themselves to learn the native language of the country where they shall reside, the better to enable them to instruct the Gentoos that shall be the servants or the slaves of the company, or of their agents, in the Protestant Religion’ (J. W. Kaye, The Administration of the East India Company, 1853, p. 626, cited in Sinha (1978: 10).

46. Sinha (1978: 13)；Kachru (1983: 21)。

46. Sinha (1978: 13); Kachru (1983: 21).

47. WH Carey，《尊敬的约翰公司美好的旧时光》，1906 年，第 397 页，引自 Sinha (1978: 10)。

47. W. H. Carey, The Good Old Days of Honourable John Company, 1906, p. 397, cited in Sinha (1978: 10).

48.大英图书馆，附加手稿，13828，第 306v-308r 页；麦金农继续提议在勒克瑙建立一所神学院，利用现有的古典书籍图书馆教授英语和古典希腊语。

48. British Library, Additional Manuscripts, 13828, pp. 306v-308r; McKinnon goes on to propose setting up a seminary, teaching English and classical Greek, in Lucknow, on the basis of an existing library of classical books.

49.议会辩论（1813 年），26：562-3。

49. Parliament Debate (1813), 26: 562-3.

50. 摘自《教育记录》第一卷（H. Sharp，1920 年），第 22 页，以及第二卷（JA Richey），第 152 页，引自 Sinha（1978 年：32）。

50. Selections from Educational Records I (H. Sharp, 1920), p. 22, and II (J. A. Richey), p. 152, cited in Sinha (1978: 32).

51.海德·伊斯特爵士于 1816 年 5 月 18 日致 J. 哈灵顿的信，引自 Sinha (1978: 36)。

51. Sir Hyde East’s letter to J. Harrington, 18 May 1816, cited in Sinha (1978: 36).

52.拉姆·莫汉·罗伊于 1823 年 12 月 11 日写给阿默斯特勋爵的信，引自 Kachru (1983: 60)。

52. Ram Mohan Roy’s letter to Lord Amherst, 11 Dec. 1823, cited in Kachru (1983: 60).

53. Samachar Darpan，1834 年 4 月 23 日，Sinha 引用（1978：41）。

53. Samachar Darpan, 23 April 1834, cited in Sinha (1978: 41).

54.达夫（1837：3）。代表法律界利益的委员会成员托马斯·巴宾顿·麦考利给人留下了深刻的印象。他那份被委员会采纳的《关于印度教育的备忘录》中的一些措辞严厉的引文出现在本节的题词和第二章的脚注中。

54. Duff (1837: 3). The member of the committee representing the law interest, Thomas Babington Macaulay, made a particular impression. Damning quotations from his Minute on Indian Education, which was accepted by the committee, appear in the epigraph to this section and in a footnote in Chapter 2.

55. Duff（1837 年：附录，第 2 页）。

55. Duff (1837: App., p. 2).

56. Spear（1965：127）。

56. Spear (1965: 127).

57. Crystal (2003: 46)。在他对世界英语人口的总结中，Crystal 认为 2001 年印度约有 19% 的人口（2 亿）说英语，但巴基斯坦约有 12% 的人口（1700 万），斯里兰卡约有 10% 的人口（190 万），而孟加拉国约有 3% 的人口（350 万）说英语。

57. Crystal (2003: 46). In his summary of world English-speaking populations, Crystal plumps for about 19 per cent of Indians in 2001 (200 million), but 12 per cent of Pakistanis (17 million), 10 per cent of Sri Lankans (1.9 million), and barely 3 per cent of Bangladeshis (3.5 million).

58. Alexander Duff 在 1837 年出版的另一本小册子《为苏格兰教会的印度传教事业辩护》第 27 页中写道。

58. Alexander Duff’s words, in another 1837 pamphlet, Vindication of the Church of Scotland’s India Missions, p. 27.

59. Flannery (1994: 326)；Dixon (1980: 1)；Crystal (2003: 41)。

59. Flannery (1994: 326); Dixon (1980: 1); Crystal (2003: 41).

60. Flannery（1994：338）；Crystal（2003：41）。

60. Flannery (1994: 338); Crystal (2003: 41).

61. Grimes（2000）。

61. Grimes (2000).

62. Crystal（2003：57）。

62. Crystal (2003: 57).

63.同上：第62-65页对其中一些国家给出了令人惊讶的估计，表明45%的尼日利亚人和84%的利比里亚人会说英语。由于这些国家的识字率相当高，这些数字很可能反映了接受过英语教育的人数。但克里斯特尔明确指出的原因是英语衍生的皮钦语和克里奥尔语的普遍存在。

63. ibid.: 62-5 offers some surprising estimates for some of these countries, suggesting that 45 per cent of Nigerians, and 84 per cent of Liberians, speak English. These may well reflect the number who have received some English-language education, since the literacy levels in these countries are rather high. But Crystal’s explicit reason is the prevalence of English-based pidgins and Creoles.

64. Sarah Nākoa，Lei Momi O 'Ewa（“珍珠花环”），1979 年，第 14 页。 19，华纳引用（1999：71）。

64. Sarah Nākoa, Lei Momi O ‘Ewa (’Garland of Pearls Awry’), 1979, p. 19, cited in Warner (1999: 71).

65. Kennedy (1988: 151)；P. Bairoch 1982 年的《1750 年至 1980 年的国际工业化水平》，《欧洲经济史杂志》，第 11 卷；F. Crouzet 1982 年的《维多利亚时代的经济》，伦敦。

65. Kennedy (1988: 151); P. Bairoch 1982 is ‘International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980’, Journal of European Economic History, 11, and F. Crouzet 1982 is The Victorian Economy, London.

66. WSJ Jevons，《煤炭问题》，伦敦：麦克米伦出版社，1865 年。

66. W. S. J. Jevons, The Coal Question, London: Macmillan, 1865.

67. Crystal (2003: 88)。法语在官方使用中排名第二，占比 49%；除此之外，只有阿拉伯语、西班牙语和德语的使用率超过 10%。

67. Crystal (2003: 88). French was the runner-up in official use with 49 per cent; otherwise, only Arabic, Spanish and German achieved over 10 per cent.

68.同上：65。

68. ibid.: 65.

69. 《今日印度》，1997 年 8 月 18 日：“与人口普查中英语是极少数人的语言的说法相反，民意调查显示，几乎三分之一的印度人声称听得懂英语，尽管只有不到 20% 的人有信心说英语。”引自 Graddol (1999: 64)。

69. India Today, 18 August 1997: ‘Contrary to the census myth that English is the language of a microscopic minority, the poll indicates that almost one in three Indians claims to understand English, although less than 20 per cent are confident of speaking it.’ Cited in Graddol (1999: 64).

70.英语的这种“世俗性”是彭尼库克（Pennycook，1994）的主要论述主题，尤其关注其在马来西亚和新加坡的体现：其内涵被视为政治性的，也具有经济性的。菲利普森（Phillipson，1992）则提出了英语教学有害的观点，并将其描述为语言帝国主义。

70. This ’ worldliness’ of English is a major theme of Pennycook (1994), considered especially as it shows up in Malaysia and Singapore: its overtones are seen as political, as well as economic. And Phillipson (1992) develops a view of ELT as malign, characterising it as Linguistic Imperialism.

71. Guilarte (1998: 22-3)。

71. Guilarte (1998: 22-3).

72. Joyce (1977 [1910]: 33, 85); Gensler (1993: 235-42); 参见第 7 章“奔跑：凯尔特人的冲动优势”，第 290 页。

72. Joyce (1977 [1910]: 33, 85); Gensler (1993: 235-42); and see Chapter 7, ‘Run: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts’, p. 290.

第四部分：今日与明日的语言

IV Languages Today and Tomorrow

13 当前前二十名

13 The Current Top Twenty

1.根据马里奥·西特罗尼在霍恩布洛尔和斯帕沃斯（1999）中给出的日期。马提亚尔指的当然不是现代书籍的各个部分，而是“脐带”（ umbilici），即卷轴缠绕的杆子；librarius指的是抄写员或书商，而不是出版商。

1. Following the date given by Mario Citroni, in Hornblower and Spawforth (1999). Martial is referring, of course, not to the parts of a modern book, but to umbilici, ‘navels’, the rods around which the scroll was wound up; librarius means copyist or bookseller rather than a publisher.

2.这些数据的主要来源是《民族语》（Ethnologue）第十四版（Grimes 2000），该版本本身就是对来自各种来源的数据进行汇编而成。主要语言的母语使用者和第二语言使用者的人口数量则来自Funk & Wagnall的《世界年鉴》（World Almanac）。

2. The principal source of these figures is the fourteenth edition of Ethnologue (Grimes 2000), itself a compilation of figures from a variety of sources. The population sizes for native and secondary speakers of major languages are derived from Funk & Wagnall’s World Almanac.

3. Crystal (2003)、Graddol (1997) 和 Graddol (1999) 对此进行了一些探讨，以了解英语的真实数据与这些数据之间可能存在的根本差异。

3. Some consideration of how radically the true figures for English may differ from these can be found in Crystal (2003), Graddol (1997) and Graddol (1999).

4. Wilkinson (2000: 27)；Norman (1988: 48-9, 187)。

4. Wilkinson (2000: 27); Norman (1988: 48-9, 187).

5. Miller（1967：144）。

5. Miller (1967: 144).

6. Baugh 和 Cable (2002: 194)。

6. Baugh and Cable (2002: 194).

7. Masica（1991：27-8）。

7. Masica (1991: 27-8).

8. Entwistle 和 Morison (1949: 288)。

8. Entwistle and Morison (1949: 288).

9. Dalby（1998：668）。

9. Dalby (1998: 668).

10. Bourciez（1967：287）。

10. Bourciez (1967: 287).

11.同上：397。

11. ibid.: 397.

12. Dalby (1998: 328)；对于韩语而言，实际上不可能追溯到十五世纪语音书写系统建立之前的任何方言变化。

12. Dalby (1998: 328); for Korean, it is impossible in practice to trace any dialectal variation earlier than the establishment of a phonetic writing system in the fifteenth century.

13.人口统计数据的来源是联合国人口基金（UNFPA）的《2000 年世界人口状况》和联合国社会信息和政策分析部人口司的《1996 年世界人口》，如 Wright (2000: 468-72) 所述。

13. The source of population statistics is United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), The State of World Population 2000, and United Nations Department for Social Information and Policy Analysis, Population Division, World Population 1996, as reported in Wright (2000: 468-72).

14 展望未来

14 Looking Ahead

1. Bauer（1996：27）。

1. Bauer (1996: 27).

2.教宗亚历山大六世的诏书《Inter Caetera》（1493年5月3日）：‘……因此，我们向主郑重推荐您神圣而值得称赞的计划，并渴望此计划得以实现，使救主之名在这些地区得以传播。我们以主的名义，并以我们所领受的圣洗礼（我们藉此有义务服从使徒的命令）和我们主耶稣基督的慈悲之心，竭力劝勉您，务必以这种方式推进这项远征，并以对正统信仰的热忱，劝导居住在这些岛屿上的人民接受基督教信仰，无论面临何种艰辛或危险，都不要退缩，并坚信全能的上帝必将乐意与您同在……’

2. Papal Bull of Alexander VI, Inter Caetera (3 May 1493): ‘…We, then, commending greatly to the Lord your holy and praiseworthy purpose, and desiring that the same attain the due end, and that in those regions the name of our Saviour be introduced, we exhort you with all our power in the Lord and by the reception of holy baptism by which we are obliged to obey the Apostolic commands and with the entrails of mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ we require you intently that you pursue in this manner this expedition and that with spirit imbued with zeal for the orthodox faith you will and must persuade the people who inhabit the said islands to embrace the Christian faith without ever quailing at the labours or the dangers, with the firm hope and confidence that Almighty God will happily accompany your endeavour …’

3.哈罗德·麦克米伦，1960 年 2 月 3 日在南非议会的演讲。

3. Harold Macmillan, speech to South African parliament, 3 February 1960.

4.为罗伯特·奥特曼 1975 年的电影《纳什维尔》（理查德·巴斯金作曲）创作并演唱。

4. Composed for, and sung in, Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville (music by Richard Baskin).

5.福山（1992）。

5. Fukuyama (1992).

6. Crystal（2003：191）。

6. Crystal (2003: 191).

7.萨尔曼·鲁西迪（他本人无疑是英语的杰出代表）早在1981年就认为：“关于英语在后英国时代的印度是否合适的争论自1947年以来就一直激烈进行；但如今，我发现这场争论只对老一辈人有意义。独立后的印度儿童似乎并不认为英语因其殖民渊源而无可救药地受到玷污。他们将其视为一种印度语言，一种他们手头可用的工具。”（《英联邦文学并不存在》），载于《虚构的家园》（伦敦：格兰塔出版社，1991年）。

7. As Salman Rushdie, admittedly a major exponent of English himself, believed already in 1981: ‘The debate about the appropriateness of English in post-British India has been raging ever since 1947; but today, I find, it’s a debate which has meaning only for the older generation. The children of independent India seem not to think of English as being irredeemably tainted by its colonial provenance. They use it as an Indian language, as one of the tools they have to hand.’ ‘Commonwealth literature does not exist’, in Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1991).

8. Graddol (1997: 26) 阐述的“engco”模型。

8. The ‘engco’ model, expounded in Graddol (1997: 26).

9. 1984年，美国以英语为母语的人口估计为2.1亿（Grimes 2000）。1980年至1990年间，美国人口从226,542,203人增长至248,709,873人（美国人口普查局，1980年数据，1987年修订；引自Wright 2000: 264）。该引文出自比尔·埃默森于1995年1月4日提交美国众议院的《英语语言赋权法案》摘要，引自Crystal (2003: 130)。截至2004年9月，该法案尚未通过任何相关条款。

9. First-language English speakers in the USA were estimated at 210 million in 1984 (Grimes 2000). Between 1980 and 1990, the US population grew from 226, 542, 203 to 248, 709, 873 (US Census Bureau, 1980 figure revised in 1987; cited in Wright 2000: 264). The quote is from a summary of Bill Emerson’s English Language Empowerment Bill, presented to the US House of Representatives on 4 January 1995, as cited by Crystal (2003: 130). No such provision has yet (as of September 2004) been adopted as law.

10. Bauer（1996：33-40）。

10. Bauer (1996: 33-40).

11. Anderson（1991：133-4）。

11. Anderson (1991: 133-4).

12. Krauss（2001：19）。

12. Krauss (2001: 19).

13. Crystal（2003：191）。

13. Crystal (2003: 191).

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Wolfson, Nessa and Joan Manes (1985), Language of Inequality, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

世界年鉴和事实手册（1995 年），新泽西州马瓦：Funk & Wagnalls 出版社。

World Almanac and Book of Facts (1995), Mahwah, NJ: Funk & Wagnalls.

Wright, John W.（编）（2000、2001），《纽约时报年鉴》，哈蒙兹沃思：企鹅出版社。

Wright, John W. (ed.) (2000, 2001), New York Times Almanac, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

赖特，罗杰（1982），西班牙和加洛林王朝法国的晚期拉丁语和早期罗曼语，利物浦：弗朗西斯·凯恩斯。

Wright, Roger (1982), Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France, Liverpool: Francis Cairns.

Young, GM (编) (1957)，麦考利散文与诗歌，马萨诸塞州剑桥：哈佛大学出版社。

Young, G. M. (ed.) (1957), Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Yule, Henry 和 Arthur Burnell (1986 [1903]), Hobson-Jobson: 口语化的英印词汇表, 新德里: Rupa & Co.

Yule, Henry and Arthur Burnell (1986 [1903]), Hobson-Jobson: a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, New Delhi: Rupa & Co.

指数

INDEX

此电子版的页码与原版不符。如需查找特定段落，请使用电子书阅读器的搜索功能。

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

语言、语系和方言名称以粗体标示。文学作品标题以斜体标示，作者姓名用括号括起来。

Language, family and dialect names are marked in bold. Literary titles are marked with italics, with the author’s name in parentheses.

锡兰（科迪纳）389号描述

A description of Ceylon (Cordiner) 389

《美国语言之钥》（威廉姆斯著）481、484页

A Key into the Language of America (Williams) 481, 484

亚琛 316-317

Aachen 316-317

阿卜杜勒·马利克，哈里发97

’Abd el Malik, Caliph 97

‘Abdul Qasim ‘Unsuri，波斯诗人 110

’Abdul Qasim ‘Unsuri, Persian poet 110

阿布·纳瓦斯，波斯诗人，98

Abu Nawas, Persian poet 98

Siraf 103 n的 Abu Zayd

Abu Zayd of Siraf 103n

法国学院 409

Académie Française 409

阿卡迪亚人 414北

Acadians 414n

亚齐语208

Acehnese 208

希腊语亚该亚方言236

Achaean dialect of Greek 236

阿凯亚人 240

Achaeans 240

阿契美尼德王朝，波斯帝国的统治王朝，公元98年

Achaemenids, ruling house of the Persian empire 98

阿切·皮韦361

Aché Pyvé 361

阿科斯塔，约瑟夫·德，西班牙历史学家 337

Acosta, Joseph de, Spanish historian 337

阿达德-尼尔什里 (Adad-niršri)，亚述国王 64

Adad-niršri, king of Assyria 64

亚当斯，威尔，《英国武士》388

Adams, Will, British samurai 388

学习进步（培根）328

Advancement of Learning (Bacon) 328

爱琴海 264, 267

Aegean 264, 267

希腊语埃奥利克方言236, 237 n

Aeolic dialect of Greek 236, 237n

阿富汗 39、4748、85、96、99、101、108、212、245、257、269、536

Afghanistan 39, 4748, 85, 96, 99, 101, 108, 212, 245, 257, 269, 536

非洲 12、45、111、391、527

Africa 12, 45, 111, 391, 527

人口统计数据 530

demographics 530

以及英语507

and English 507

法兰西帝国（417-419年、444年、490年）

French empire 417-419, 444, 490

德国殖民地 448

German colonies 448

第二语言使用者 515

second-language speakers 515

南非荷兰语399、444、507

Afrikaans 399, 444, 507

亚非语系语言36、90、97、102、122、554

Afro-Asiatic languages 36, 90, 97, 102, 122, 554

阿格巴塔纳 43

Agbatana 43

Aguilar, Jerónimo de，西班牙语翻译 342

Aguilar, Jerónimo de, Spanish interpreter 342

阿希卡尔，阿拉米圣贤 38, 83

Ahiqar, Aramaean sage 38, 83

阿希兰，比布鲁斯国王，公元72年

Ahiram, king of Byblos 72

阿赫塔顿 62

Akhetaten 62

阿卡德语

Akkadian

Amama 通信 62, 128

Amama correspondence 62, 128

亚述 13、21、79、129

and Assyria 13, 21, 79, 129

作为古典语言 68

as classical language 68

作为识字模型 58-68, 512

as model of literacy 58-68, 512

双语现象与苏美尔语51, 53-57, 111, 163

bilingualism with Sumerian 51, 53-57, 111, 163

影响 80,517

influence 80, 517

通用语 61-62、65、67-68、128-129

lingua franca 61-62, 65, 67-68, 128-129

文献30-33

literature 30-33

名称由来 60

origin of name 60

语言范围 59

range of language 59

与阿拉伯语93、110、112相关

related to Arabic 93, 110, 112

闪米特语 35, 35 n , 36-37, 40-44

Semitic language 35, 35n, 36-37, 40-44

书面形式 11 n , 33, 46, 49-50, 512

written form 11n, 33, 46, 49-50, 512

另见文字、楔形文字

see also writing, cuneiform

阿肯那顿，法老 125-126 年

Akhenaten, Pharaoh 125-126

贾希兹 98

Al-Jahiz 98

Al-Muqaddasi，阿拉伯地理学家 98

Al-Muqaddasi, Arab geographer 98

阿拉 62

Alalah 62

艾伦斯 305、307、308、425

Alans 305, 307, 308, 425

阿尔昆，英国学者 316-318, 328

Alcuin, English scholar 316-318, 328

亚历山大一世，沙皇 431、433、438

Aleksandr I, Tsar 431, 433, 438

阿列克谢，沙皇431

Aleksey, Tsar 431

阿勒颇 41

Aleppo 41

亚历山大大帝 12, 30, 48, 57, 75-76, 85-86, 131, 165, 191, 219, 239, 243-245, 248, 250, 257, 276, 278

Alexander the Great 12, 30, 48, 57, 75-76, 85-86, 131, 165, 191, 219, 239, 243-245, 248, 250, 257, 276, 278

亚历山大六世，教皇，336、365 年

Alexander VI, Pope 336, 365

亚历山大远征记（阿里安著）272

Alexander’s Campaign (Arrian) 272

埃及亚历山大 48、86、130、131、247-249、259

Alexandria in Egypt 48, 86, 130, 131, 247-249, 259

亚拉各斯人的亚历山大城 246

Alexandria of the Arachosians 246

卡斯蒂利亚国王阿方索十世，公元384年

Alfonso X of Castile, king 384

阿尔及利亚 411-412、416-418、444、520

Algeria 411-412, 416-418, 444, 520

阿尔冈昆语系477 n , 483 n , 484

Algonquian languages 477n, 483n, 484

阿尔摩拉维德王朝 99, 384

Almoravids 99, 384

阿洛彭，聂斯托利派僧侣，90岁

Alopen, Nestorian monk 90

字母

Alphabet

抽象工具 46

abstract tool 46

婆罗米文 85 n , 156

Brahmi 85n, 156

西里尔字母 442、443 n

Cyrillic 442, 443n

前34、72n 、110、155

first 34, 72n, 110, 155

Kharoshthi 85 n

Kharoshthi 85n

希腊语 242

Greek 242

卢加诺 284-285

Lugano 284-285

罗马书 242, 476

Roman 242, 476

符文106

runic 106

悉达 156

Siddha 156

另见写作

see also writing

阿尔泰语系138, 145, 146, 150, 151, 170

Altaic languages 138, 145, 146, 150, 151, 170

特征 138、145

characteristics 138, 145

阿尔坦汗 179

Altan Khan 179

阿马迪斯·德·高拉331

Amadís de Gaula 331

Amama 通信 62, 128

Amama correspondence 62, 128

阿蒙霍特普三世，法老，公元前231年

Amenophis III, pharaoh 231n

美国文化，世界对179年的热情

Americana, world enthusiasm for 179

美洲

Americas

双语现象 346、367、376

bilingualism 346, 367, 376

利马会议 373

Council of Lima 373

英语社区 480-481

English-speaking communities 480-481

欧洲殖民地 482

European colonies 482

西班牙化373-377

Hispanización 373-377

土著语言 347-355、356-360、361-364、366-375、480-484

indigenous languages 347-355, 356-360, 361-364, 366-375, 480-484

语言学习 345-346

language-learning 345-346

人口损失 22、336-338、365

loss of population 22, 336-338, 365

传教士语言学家 346-347、364、368、371、373-375、392-394、481 n、499 n、509、519、537、540 n

missionary linguists 346-347, 364, 368, 371, 373-375, 392-394, 481n, 499n, 509, 519, 537, 540n

政治独立 375

political independence 375

以及葡萄牙语391-395

and Portuguese 391-395

西班牙语传播340、343、347、364-373、376、444、495

spread of Spanish 340, 343, 347, 364-373, 376, 444, 495

阿姆哈拉语36, 92

Amharic 36, 92

阿米什社区 92

Amish community 92

菊石 70

Ammonite 70

阿摩利特60 n

Amorite 60n

阿摩利人 35 n , 40, 42, 53, 60, 111, 164

Amorites 35n, 40, 42, 53, 60, 111, 164

阿那卡西斯，斯基泰贤者，公元243年

Anacharsis, Scythian sage 243

阿纳瓦克，墨西哥东北部的一个城镇，344

Anáhuac, town in north-eastern Mexico 344

安纳托利亚 38, 42, 43 n , 47-48, 65, 71, 83-84, 86, 106, 153, 247, 249, 250, 260, 260 n , 262, 263-265

Anatolia 38, 42, 43n, 47-48, 65, 71, 83-84, 86, 106, 153, 247, 249, 250, 260, 260n, 262, 263-265

高卢人的入侵（公元293-294年，314年）

incursions by Gauls 293-294, 314

以及俄罗斯 434

and Russia 434

鲁姆苏丹国 263

Sultanate of Rum 263

土耳其队推进264、266局

Turkish advances 264, 266

安达卢斯，参见西班牙

Andalūs, el- see Spain

阿拉伯语安达卢西亚方言99

Andalusi dialect of Arabic 99

安达卢西亚 332

Andalusia 332

安德森，本尼迪克特 400 n，557

Anderson, Benedict 400n, 557

安茹王朝 460 n , 463, 465-466

Angevin dynasty 460n, 463, 465-466

安格尔西岛 302、313

Anglesey 302, 313

英荷战争 493

Anglo-Dutch war 493

盎格鲁-诺曼语460 n，461-465另见

Anglo-Norman 460n, 461-465 see also

诺曼法语

Norman French

《盎格鲁-撒克逊编年史》461年

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 461

《威尔士年鉴》 313

Annales Cambriae 313

《阿尔斯特编年史》 313

Annals of Ulster 313

鞍山56-58

Anshan 56-58

安提阿尔基达斯，公元192年、247年国王

Antialkidas, king 192, 247

安提阿 90、247、250 n

Antioch 90, 247, 250n

安条克·索特，公元前68年国王

Antiochus Soter, king 68

阿波利纳里斯，西多尼乌斯 300

Apollinaris, Sidonius 300

泰阿那的阿波罗尼奥斯 258

Apollonius of Tyana 258

阿基坦人 301

Aquitanians 301

阿拉伯 101、102、121、209

Arabia 101, 102, 121, 209

阿拉伯语20-22、35、38、49、78、88 n、93-105、335、527 n

Arabic 20-22, 35, 38, 49, 78, 88n, 93-105, 335, 527n

安达卢西亚方言99

Andalusi dialect 99

双语现象 97-100, 163

bilingualism 97-100, 163

人口统计数据 527 n，530

demographics 527n, 530

双舌症 98

diglossia 98

语言教学 521

Language Teaching 521

马格里布方言78 n

Maghrebi dialect 78n

语音区别 108

phonetic distinctions 108

发音 69 n , 94

pronunciation 69n, 94

以及克利奥帕特拉女王 131

and Queen Cleopatra 131

神圣语言 93-96、98、100-101、110、520

sacred language 93-96, 98, 100-101, 110, 520

脚本 94 n，97

script 94n, 97

与希伯来语110的相似度

similarity to Hebrew 110

95、97-98、102-105、108、111-112、134、141、149、164-165、209、212、260、377、490、528 n、536、547、554 号病例的传播

spread of 95, 97-98, 102-105, 108, 111-112, 134, 141, 149, 164-165, 209, 212, 260, 377, 490, 528n, 536, 547, 554

阿拉伯人和埃及 164-165, 260

Arabs, and Egypt 164-165, 260

阿拉贡 99, 332

Aragon 99, 332

Aram 35 n , 64, 80, 83

Aram 35n, 64, 80, 83

阿拉米人 43-44、64-66、111、164

Aramaeans 43-44, 64-66, 111, 164

阿拉姆语12、13、21、22、35、35 n、38、47-50、57、80、250、335、536

Aramaic 12, 13, 21, 22, 35, 35n, 38, 47-50, 57, 80, 250, 335, 536

字母文字 63-64

alphabetic script 63-64

法院语言 269、517、548

chancery language 269, 517, 548

在中国 141

in China 141

基督教 88-90，90 n，111

and Christianity 88-90, 90n, 111

硬币 247、249

coins 247, 249

以及埃及 129-132、149、164-165

and Egypt 129-132, 149, 164-165

帝国 80-81

Imperial 80-81

铭文 83-85、249

inscriptions 83-85, 249

伊朗108

and Iran 108

以及伊斯兰教 88 n , 97

and Islam 88n, 97

作为通用语 246, 258

as lingua franca 246, 258

阿卡德亚队以60-61、63、65-68、70、76、78杆的比分反超。

overtakes Akkadian 60-61, 63, 65-68, 70, 76, 78

发音 81

pronunciation 81

与阿拉伯语93、110相关

related to Arabic 93, 110

公元85年，希腊语取代波斯语成为波斯的官方语言。

supplanted by Greek as language of Persia 85

书面国际语 82

written interlingua 82

阿卡迪亚 236

Arcadia 236

希腊语阿卡多-塞浦路斯方言236

Arcado-Cyprian dialects of Greek 236

考古学 31, 46 n , 67, 124-129, 136, 281, 290, 357

Archaeology 31, 46n, 67, 124-129, 136, 281, 290, 357

波斯国王阿尔达希尔（公元259年）

Ardashir, king of Persia 259

阿根廷 339, 372

Argentina 339, 372

非国教徒威尔士人 93

Nonconformist Welsh 93

阿里斯托芬 551

Aristophanes 551

亚里士多德 265, 278

Aristotle 265, 278

亚美尼亚 41、88、93、96、241、269

Armenia 41, 88, 93, 96, 241, 269

亚美尼亚语24 n , 43, 300 n , 434, 435, 442

Armenian 24n, 43, 300n, 434, 435, 442

字母表 88

alphabet 88

阿诺德，马太福音 516 n

Arnold, Matthew 516n

Arphaxad，希伯来语祖先 35 n

Arphaxad, Hebrew ancestor 35n

阿里安，希腊历史学家，公元272年

Arrian, Greek historian 272

阿尔萨斯，帕提亚国王，公元前85年

Arsaces, Parthian king 85

阿尔萨梅斯，波斯总督，公元83年

Arsames, Persian governor 83

波斯国王阿尔塔薛西斯公元前82年

Artaxerxes, king of Persia 82

Arte de la Lengua General …del Perú 334, 346

亚瑟王，传奇国王，公元前461年

Arthur, legendary king 461

亚瑟王传说 313

Arthurian legends 313

阿尔瓦迪特人 35 n

Arwadites 35n

雅利安语系41, 176-178, 187-190, 195-198, 212 n , 216-217, 223

Aryan languages 41, 176-178, 187-190, 195-198, 212n, 216-217, 223

《雅利安人》186-187

Aryāvarta 186-187

阿什杜德 129

Ashdod 129

亚述国王亚述巴尼拔（公元32、54、59年）

Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria 32, 54, 59

亚洲

Asia

英语505、513、528

English 505, 513, 528

法兰西帝国 417

French empire 417

移民 535

immigration 535

伊朗语109

Iranian languages 109

波斯语 108

Persian 108

葡萄牙帝国（385-390年，496年）

Portuguese empire 385-390, 496

罗马规则252

Roman rule 252

突厥语系 107

Turkic languages 107

小亚细亚 12, 295

Asia Minor 12, 295

阿育王，公元前84、151、178、186-9、197-9、208、215、218、220、246、503年

Aśoka, emperor 84, 151, 178, 186-9, 197-9, 208, 215, 218, 220, 246, 503n

阿萨姆语 176

Assamese 176

阿舒尔 35 n , 61, 66

Asshur 35n, 61, 66

阿舒尔巴尼拔 56

Asshurbanipal 56

亚述 13、30、40、42、44、46-47、49、56、61-65、111、120、423 n

Assyria 13, 30, 40, 42, 44, 46-47, 49, 56, 61-65, 111, 120, 423n

驱逐出境 65-66、79

deportations 65-66, 79

以及埃及 128-129、164-165

and Egypt 128-129, 164-165

阿斯特拉罕 106, 427

Astrakhan 106, 427

阿塔瓦尔帕，印加皇帝 342-343, 356

Atahuallpa, Inca emperor 342-343, 356

阿塔图尔克，土耳其牧师，公元105年

Atatürk, Turkish priest 105n

雅典 232-233、242、254 n

Athens 232-233, 242, 254n

阿提拉，匈奴将军 106, 306

Attila, Hun general 106, 306

厚也，鹫须 449

Atsuya, Washisu 449

希腊语阿提卡方言229-230, 231 n , 271

Attic dialect of Greek 229-230, 231n, 271

阿提卡主义 255-257, 329

Atticism 255-257, 329

文献268

literature 268

作家 254 n

writers 254n

圣奥古斯丁，希波主教，46, 75-76, 307 n , 308

Augustine (Saint), bishop of Hippo, 46, 75-76, 307n, 308

奥古斯都，罗马皇帝，公元前76年、公元前259年

Augustus, Roman emperor 76, 259

奥斯汀，摩西，美国开发商 490，494

Austin, Moses, US developer 490, 494

澳大利亚 12、19、505-506、508、510、514 n、535

Australia 12, 19, 505-506, 508, 510, 514n, 535

奥地利 448

Austria 448

南亚语系201, 205

Austro-Asiatic languages 201, 205

南岛语系 22, 205

Austronesian 22, 205

阿瓦尔斯 41、262、306、425

Avars 41, 262, 306, 425

阿维斯塔经文 48、96

Avesta scriptures 48, 96

阿维努斯，罗马诗人，公元290年

Avienus, Roman poet 290

艾马拉语357、364、368、370

Aymara 357, 364, 368, 370

Ayvu Rapyta 361

阿塞拜疆 93, 434-435, 443 n

Azerbaijan 93, 434-435, 443n

阿兹特克人 1-4、12、15、348、351-355、372

Aztecs 1-4, 12, 15, 348, 351-355, 372

巴布尔，皇帝，公元106年、212年

Babur, emperor 106, 212

巴比伦 53, 55-57, 278

Babylon 53, 55-57, 278

文明 30、50、53、56-57、58-61、63-64、66、70、79-80、82、129、165

civilization 30, 50, 53, 56-57, 58-61, 63-64, 66, 70, 79-80, 82, 129, 165

第44、47、68朝

dynasties 44, 47, 68

卡西特收购 40-41, 55, 60, 62, 63

Kassite takeover 40-41, 55, 60, 62, 63

阿卡德语的使用 42, 61, 67 n , 111, 130, 247

use of Akkadian 42, 61, 67n, 111, 130, 247

和尼姆罗德 35 n

and Nimrod 35n

名称由来 58

origin of name 58

《塔木德》90

Talmud 90

巴比伦尼亚，希腊统治时期（公元前245年、247年）

Babylonia, Greek overlordship 245, 247

巴克利德斯，希腊抒情诗人，公元130年

Bacchylides, Greek lyric poet 130

培根，弗朗西斯，英国圣贤 328

Bacon, Francis, English sage 328

Bactria 178, 257-258

双峰岛48 n , 108

Bactrian 48n, 108

巴格达 101, 167

Baghdad 101, 167

印度尼西亚语403, 444, 532

Bahasa Indonesia 403, 444, 532

Bairoch，第510页，575-576页脚注65

Bairoch, P.510, 575-576n65

巴厘岛 204、207

Bali 204, 207

巴尔干半岛 261, 424

Balkans 261, 424

以及德国 447

and German 447

军事灾难 273

military catastrophe 273

人口 260 n

population 260n

斯拉夫人入侵（公元310年、423年）

Slav invasions 310, 423

斯拉夫语的传播 275、280、309

spread of Slavic 275, 280, 309

波罗的海国家 429、431、432-433、439、442

Baltic states 429, 431, 432-433, 439, 442

俾路支斯坦 47

Baluchistan 47

班图语 9, 22, 23 n , 103-104, 507, 532

Bantu languages 9, 22, 23n, 103-104, 507, 532

巴努希拉尔 100-101

Banu Hilal 100-101

野蛮人 158、160、167-170、227、228、230、232

Barbarians 158, 160, 167-170, 227, 228, 230, 232

Basa Perteges（荷兰语） 389 n

Basa Perteges (Dutch) 389n

阿拉巴马州巴沙姆 216

Basham, A.L. 216

拜占庭皇帝巴西尔一世，公元262年

Basil I, Byzantine emperor 262

巴斯克语301

Basque 301

巴斯克人 290, 306 n

Basques 290, 306n

巴沙尔·本·布尔德，波斯诗人，98

Basshar bin Burd, Persian poet 98

巴塔维 398 n

Batavi 398n

贝叶挂毯 319

Bayeux Tapestry 319

巴赞，路易 139

Bazin, Louis 139

比尔，塞缪尔 138 n

Beal, Samuel 138n

托马斯·贝克特，诺曼主教 408

Becket, Thomas à, Norman bishop 408

贝都因人93

Bedouin 93

贝希斯顿，岩石铭文 32、57

Behistun, rock inscription 32, 57

北京 143、144、145、151、529

Beijing 143, 144, 145, 151, 529

贝雅131 n

Beja 131n

白俄罗斯 425、429、431、439、443

Belarus 425, 429, 431, 439, 443

比利时 407、418-419

Belgium 407, 418-419

孟加拉/孟加拉语 149, 527 n , 528, 530

Bengal/Bengali 149, 527n, 528, 530

柏柏尔语（塔马齐格特语）127, 292, 307 n , 412 n

Berber (Tamazight) 127, 292, 307n, 412n

柏柏尔人 36、97、99-100

Berbers 36, 97, 99-100

贝尔纳迪诺，加斯帕·德·桑兄弟 388

Bernardino, Brother Gaspar de San 388

《薄伽梵歌》 195

Bhāgavad Gītā 195

圣经

Bible

英文授权版本 473 n

Authorised version in English 473n

希腊文 七十士译本248

Greek Septuagint 248

拉丁 文武加大译本294

Latin Vulgate 294

新约87

New Testament 87

马太福音 87 n

Matthew 87n

旧约31章，70节

Old Testament 31, 70

译文 472-473、485、521、573注释114、574注释24

translations 472-473, 485, 521, 573n114, 574n24

另见 希伯来语、经文

see also Hebrew, scriptures

比斯拉马508

Bislama 508

俾斯麦，奥托，德国总理 505

Bismarck, Otto, German Chancellor 505

比特八字 44

Bît Bazi 44

比西亚 76

Bithia 76

Black 等人 69 n

Black et al 69n

布尔战争 399

Boer War 399

波哥大 341, 362, 366, 568 n 15

Bogotá 341, 362, 366, 568n15

科普特语博海里克方言92

Bohairic dialect of Coptic 92

布哈拉101

Bokhara 101

玻利维亚 339、357、368、370、372

Bolivia 339, 357, 368, 370, 372

《路线与王国之书》 422 n

Book of Routes and Kingdoms 422n

婆罗洲 507

Borneo 507

波斯尼亚人，威廉 399

Bosnian, William 399

波斯尼亚人 430 n

Bosnians 430n

哈比卜·布尔吉巴，突尼斯总统 420

Bourguiba, Habib, President of Tunisia 420

布斯凯，GH 402 n

Bousquet, G.H. 402n

布特罗斯·加利，布特罗斯 420

Boutros Ghali, Boutros 420

拳击手，CR 396 n

Boxer, C.R. 396n

博伊尔，父亲365

Boyl, Father 365

婆罗米文 85 n , 156；另见印度文字布拉灰文 39

Brahmi script 85n, 156; see also Indic scripts Brahui 39

布罗代尔，费尔南 85 n，110

Braudel, Fernand 85n, 110

巴西 336、373 n、374 n、380、384、385、390-395、444、446、480、531

Brazil 336, 373n, 374n, 380, 384, 385, 390-395, 444, 446, 480, 531

布伦努斯 293

Brennus 293

英国

Britain

鼠疫/黑死病 313, 466-468, 518

bubonic plague/Black Death 313, 466-468, 518

以及中国 148-149

and China 148-149

殖民地 412、415、444、482-484、490-495、505-511

colonies 412, 415, 444, 482-484, 490-495, 505-511

另见印度

see also India

帝国19-20，478

empire 19-20, 478

移民 491、506、533-537

immigrants 491, 506, 533-537

工业革命 510、519

Industrial Revolution 510, 519

语言替换 310、312

language replacement 310, 312

军事灾难 273

military catastrophe 273

名称由来 517

origin of name 517

468年农民起义

Peasants’ Revolt 468

罗马入侵（公元前301-304年，310-311年）

Roman invasion 301-304, 310-311

撒克逊人入侵（公元前304-305年，310-314年）

Saxon invasions 304-305, 310-314

另见印度；英国

see also India; United Kingdom

英国和外国圣经公会 438

British and Foreign Bible Society 438

布罗夫，约翰，英国梵语学者，184

Brough, John, British scholar of Sanskrit 184

文莱 505, 532

Brunei 505, 532

布立吞语系291

Brythonic languages 291

布坎南，克劳狄乌斯，英国咆哮者 499

Buchanan, Claudius, British ranter 499

佛教 99, 108, 118, 120, 141, 143, 145 n , 146, 147, 151, 158-159, 172, 225, 246

Buddhism 99, 108, 118, 120, 141, 143, 145n, 146, 147, 151, 158-159, 172, 225, 246

和巴利文/梵文178-179、189-192、199-200、203、207-212、214、217-220、536

and Pali/Sanskrit 178-179, 189-192, 199-200, 203, 207-212, 214, 217-220, 536

布哈拉 435, 437

Bukhara 435, 437

保加利亚 262, 310

Bulgaria 262, 310

保加尔人 261、306、425

Bulgars 261, 306, 425

勃艮第人 20

Burgundians 20

缅甸 134、178、201、202、203、205、207-208、505、507

Burma 134, 178, 201, 202, 203, 205, 207-208, 505, 507

伯恩斯，罗伯特，苏格兰诗人 516

Burns, Robert, Scots poet 516

布隆迪 105

Burundi 105

商业参见贸易

Business see Trade

比布鲁斯（古布拉）39, 41, 44, 71-73, 128

Byblos (Gubla) 39, 41, 44, 71-73, 128

拜占庭帝国 96, 106, 121, 167, 260, 263 n , 329, 425, 427

Byzantine empire 96, 106, 121, 167, 260, 263n, 329, 425, 427

拜占庭（参见君士坦丁堡）

Byzantium see Constantinople

卡伯特，塞巴斯蒂安，法国航海家，349年

Cabot, Sebastian, French navigator 349n

加的斯 45

Cadiz 45

凯撒，尤利乌斯，罗马王朝君主，公元277-278年、286年、293年、294年、297年、301年

Caesar, Julius, Roman dynast 277-278, 286, 293, 294, 297, 301

阿雷拉的凯撒留斯，拉丁作家 308

Caesarius of Arelate, Latin writer 308

佩德罗·卡尔德隆·德拉·巴尔卡，西班牙剧作家 344

Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, Spanish dramatist 344

加利福尼亚州 495

Californios 495

卡尔霍恩，约翰·J.，美国参议员 488

Calhoun, John J., US Senator 488

Calliana 89参见Kalyana

Calliana 89 see Kalyana

柬埔寨 199、203-206、417、514

Cambodia 199, 203-206, 417, 514

另见高棉语

see also Khmer

波斯国王冈比西斯公元前47年

Cambyses, king of Persia 47

路易斯·瓦斯·德·卡蒙斯，葡萄牙诗人 381-382

Camões, Luis Vaz de, Portuguese poet 381-382

迦南 35号、69号、70-71、78、110-111、128

Canaan 35n, 69n, 70-71, 78, 110-111, 128

44、67人

peoples 44, 67

迦南语129

Canaanite languages 129

加拿大 411-415、444、487、535

Canada 411-415, 444, 487, 535

《坎特伯雷故事集》（乔叟）470

Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) 470n

坎蒂加·德·圣玛丽亚（阿方索十世） 384

Cantiga de Santa Maria (Alfonso X) 384

广州 159-160, 334

Canton (Guangzhou) 159-160, 334

粤语（粤语）是汉语的一种方言，见第136、141、147、528页。

Cantonese (Yuè) dialect of Chinese 136, 141, 147, 528

卡里安 84

Carian 84

加勒比海 335、337、339、346、349、365-366、379、411、412、419、479-481、494

Caribbean 335, 337, 339, 346, 349, 365-366, 379, 411, 412, 419, 479-481, 494

卡洛斯三世，西班牙国王，公元374年、377年

Carlos III, Spanish king 374, 377

卡洛斯五世，西班牙国王，公元367年、377年

Carlos V, Spanish king 367, 377

加洛林文艺复兴 316

Carolingian Renaissance 316

迦太基 21, 34, 45-46, 71, 75-78, 97, 241, 290, 292, 293-294, 305, 307 n , 536

Carthage 21, 34, 45-46, 71, 75-78, 97, 241, 290, 292, 293-294, 305, 307n, 536

卡地亚，雅克，法国探险家 412, 519

Cartier, Jacques, French explorer 412, 519

卡斯蒂利亚 332、334、384、529

Castile 332, 334, 384, 529

西班牙语卡斯蒂利亚方言99-100、332-333、364-365、367、374、382、384、400、529

Castilian dialect of Spanish 99-100, 332-333, 364-365, 367, 374, 382, 384, 400, 529

加泰罗尼亚语300、320 n、382

Catalan 300, 320n, 382

叶卡捷琳娜大帝，俄罗斯女皇，公元410、431、433、434、435年

Catherine the Great, empress of Russia 410, 431, 433, 434, 435

卡托，马库斯，罗马元老院议员，公元前279年

Cato, Marcus, Roman senator 279

卡图卢斯，诗人，公元前330年

Catullus, poet 330

高加索 12、429、434

Caucasus 12, 429, 434

Cavalli-Sforza，Luca，人类群体遗传学家 9 n

Cavalli-Sforza, Luca, human population geneticist 9n

卡克斯顿，威廉 468，471

Caxton, William 468, 471

凯尔特伊比利亚288, 291-292, 300, 301

Celtiberian 288, 291-292, 300, 301

凯尔特语273, 276, 278, 281-295, 300, 462, 464-465, 517, 554 n

Celtic languages 273, 276, 278, 281-295, 300, 462, 464-465, 517, 554n

凯尔特人 274, 281

Celts 274, 281

大西洋凯尔特人 290-291

Atlantic Celtic 290-291

在欧洲扩张 289

expansion across Europe 289

拉丁语在英国的失败（295-299年）

failure of Latin in Britain 295-299

希腊观点 276

Greek view 276

铭文 283、284-285

inscriptions 283, 284-285

大规模移民 293

mass migration 293

以及公元462-463年的诺曼入侵

and Norman invasions 462-463

部落 282

tribes 282

另见高卢人

see also Gauls

安第斯山脉中部 358-359

Central Andes 358-359

中亚 101、380、435、436-437、443

Central Asia 101, 380, 435, 436-437, 443

锡兰（参见斯里兰卡）

Ceylon see Śri Lanka

查德98

Chad 98

乍得语系36, 98

Chadic languages 36, 98

察合台突厥语106, 435

Chagatay Turkic 106, 435

迦克墩信经 89

Chalcedonians 89

迦勒底人 44、47、82、335

Chaldaeans 44, 47, 82, 335

尚普兰，塞缪尔·德，法国探险家，412

Champlain, Samuel de, French explorer 412

旃陀罗笈多·孔雀，公元191年、245年在位

Chandragupta Maurya, king 191, 245

长安（西安）90、91、151

Chang-an (Xian) 90, 91, 151

罗兰之歌319, 332 n

Chanson de Roland 319, 332n

德日进，法国神学家 403 n

Chardin, Teilhard de, French theologian 403n

查理曼大帝，公元316-317年在位。

Charlemagne, king 316-317

秃头查理，公元317-318年在位

Charles the Bald, king 317-318

查理二世，公元485年国王

Charles II, king 485

查理三世（绰号“傻瓜”），公元460年在位

Charles III (the Simple), king 460

查理五世，在位100年，公元364年

Charles V, king 100, 364

乔叟，杰弗里，英国诗人，406，470

Chaucer, Geoffrey, English poet 406, 470

车臣-印古什423 n

Chechen-Ingush 423n

车臣 434

Chechnya 434

奇布查语（也称为 穆伊斯卡/穆伊斯卡）349、361-364、367、568 n 15、569 n 37

Chibcha (also Muisca/Muysca) 349, 361-364, 367, 568n15, 569n37

Chichimeca 351-352

智利 339、358、373 n

Chile 339, 358, 373n

中国 34

China 34

时间顺序图 117-122

chronological charts 117-122

人口统计数据 530

demographics 530

名称的词源 137 n

etymology of the name 137n

考试制度 169-171

examination system 169-171

入侵

invasions

蛮族威胁 158、160、167-170、276

barbarian threat 158, 160, 167-170, 276

应对 167-173

coping with 167-173

葡萄牙探险队 334

Portugese expeditions 334

俄罗斯 427

Russian 427

以及韩国 451

and Korea 451

现代名中国167

modern name Zhōng-guo 167

人口152-153、161、173

population 152-153, 161, 173

种族政策 143

racial policy 143

宗教 90、150-152、158-159、172、178

religion 90, 150-152, 158-159, 172, 178

贸易额 147-149、159-162，（与印度）506

trade 147-149, 159-162, (with India) 506

西方方法 172

Western methods 172

郑和泥板 160-161

Zheng-he tablet 160-161

中文114-116、134-149、150、158-163、169-172、328-329、490、520、528、547

Chinese 114-116, 134-149, 150, 158-163, 169-172, 328-329, 490, 520, 528, 547

方言 116、147、528、530

dialects 116, 147, 528, 530

白话（白话）方言171-172

báihuà (white speech) dialect 171-172

粤语（粤语）方言136、141、147、528 和英语476-477

Cantonese (Yuè) dialect 136, 141, 147, 528 and English 476-477

识字率 157

literacy 157

主要语言群体 139

major language groups 139

普通话方言 7, 115 n , 116-117, 136, 141, 145, 147, 162-163, 171, 172 n , 526, 528-530

Mandarin dialect 7, 115n, 116-117, 136, 141, 145, 147, 162-163, 171, 172n, 526, 528-530

最小方言147、162

Min dialect 147, 162

语音学 209-210

phonetics 209-210

拼音罗马化 115 n , 155, 172 n

Pinyin romanization 115n, 155, 172n

中文 （续）

Chinese (cont.)

通俗文学 172 n

popular literature 172n

以及葡萄牙语 390、476

and Portuguese 390, 476

普通话116

Putōnghuà116

脚本 11、12 n

script 11, 12n

口语传统 12、21、106

speaking traditions 12, 21, 106

参见第135-136页、137-138页、144-145页、154-158页、163页、172页脚注、 173页、329页。

writing 135-136, 137-138, 144-145, 154-158, 163, 172n, 173, 329

瓜拉尼语奇里瓜诺方言363

Chiriguano dialect of Guarani 363

塔巴斯科州尚塔尔348

Chontal de Tabasco 348

基督教 22, 87-90, 92, 96, 99, 117, 121, 132-133, 141, 150, 156, 158-159, 165-167, 172

Christianity 22, 87-90, 92, 96, 99, 117, 121, 132-133, 141, 150, 156, 158-159, 165-167, 172

加尔文主义 400-402

Calvinism 400-402

和法典书格式 256 n

and codex book-format 256n

以及希腊文255-256、269-270

and Greek 255-256, 269-270

希腊文 七十士译本248

Greek Septuagint 248

拉丁 文武加大译本294

Latin Vulgate 294

传教士 345-347、364、368、371、373-375、380、387、392-394、413-414、416、481 n、485、499、509、536、540 n

missionaries 345-347, 364, 368, 371, 373-375, 380, 387, 392-394, 413-414, 416, 481n, 485, 499, 509, 536, 540n

单性论 89

Monophysites 89

景教 88-90, 119, 120, 141, 158, 536

Nestorians 88-90, 119, 120, 141, 158, 536

不墨守成规 93

Nonconformism 93

正统教义 264, 269-270

Orthodoxy 264, 269-270

新教 326, 499-504

Protestantism 326, 499-504

撒玛利亚基督徒 87

Samaritan Christians 87

经文

scriptures

使徒行传248

Acts of the Apostles 248

致哥林多人的第一封信254

First Letter to the Corinthians 254

惠特比宗教会议 517

Synod of Whitby 517

通俗风格的文本 255-256

texts in popular style 255-256

另见美洲、荷属东印度群岛、葡萄牙、西班牙

see also Americas, Dutch East Indies, Portugal, Spain

楚瓦什140 n , 306 n

Chuvash 140n, 306n

慈禧太后，151年

Ci Xi, Chinese empress 151n

西塞罗，罗马元老院议员，公元前272年、329-330年

Cicero, Roman senator, 272, 329-330

西里西亚 83, 249

Cilicia 83, 249

西斯内罗斯，枢机主教，西班牙神祇 365

Cisneros, Cardinal, Spanish divine 365

《易经》 154

Classic of Changes (Yì Jīng) 154

古典语言

Classical languages

公元前328-330年，他们的命运进行了比较（希腊语、汉语、梵语和拉丁语）；具体而言，

their fates compared 328-330 (Greek, Chinese, Sanskrit and Latin); and specifically

苏美尔语34、50、68；吉兹语92；阿拉伯语98、110；埃及语124；汉语136、169-170；梵语185-190、206；希腊语229、250-253、267-271；拉丁语299

Sumerian 34, 50, 68; Ge’ez 92; Arabic 98, 110; Egyptian 124; Chinese 136, 169-170; Sanskrit 185-190, 206; Greek 229, 250-253, 267-271; Latin 299

亚历山大的克莱门特（圣人），基督教护教士，256, 319

Clement (Saint) of Alexandria, Christian apologist 256, 319

克莱门特七世，教宗343年

Clement VII, Pope 343

克利奥帕特拉，埃及女王 131, 151 n , 165 n , 249, 259

Cleopatra, queen of Egypt 131, 151n, 165n, 249, 259

云（阿里斯托芬）551

Clouds (Aristophanes) 551

克洛维斯，国王 404

Clovis, king 404

交趾支那参见印度支那

Cochin-China see Indo-China

法典书格式 256 n

Codex book-format 256n

硬币 77、83-84、246-249、258、269

Coins 77, 83-84, 246-249, 258, 269

科尔伯特，让-巴蒂斯特，法国牧师 414, 416 n , 519

Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, French minister 414, 416n, 519

科利尼日历 292 n

Coligny calendar 292n

殖民化参见人口流动

Colonization see Population movement

哥伦比亚 339、349、372

Colombia 339, 349, 372

哥伦布，克里斯托弗，热那亚探险家 334-335, 336, 336 n , 338-341, 348, 349, 365, 385

Columbus, Christopher, Genoese explorer 334-335, 336, 336n, 338-341, 348, 349, 365, 385

商业参见贸易

Commerce see Trade

科摩罗 105

Comoros 105

孔子，中国圣贤，114-115、134、136、150、154、172

Confucius, Chinese sage, 114-115, 134, 136, 150, 154, 172

刚果 105、380、418

Congo 105, 380, 418

征服和发现格拉纳达新王国（弗雷勒）341

Conquest and discovery of the New Kingdom of Granada (Freyle) 341

君士坦丁，罗马皇帝，公元92年、153年、256年、368年在位

Constantine, Roman emperor 92, 153, 256, 368

君士坦丁七世，拜占庭皇帝，公元261年

Constantine VII, Byzantine emperor 261

君士坦丁堡 96、240、256-257、260、263、329

Constantinople 96, 240, 256-257, 260, 263, 329

库克船长，詹姆斯 4

Cook, Captain James 4

科普特语、现代埃及语、11、90、90 n、92、97、117、121、133-134、166、255、554

Coptic, modern Egyptian, 11, 90, 90n, 92, 97, 117, 121, 133-134, 166, 255, 554

科迪纳，詹姆斯牧师，英国作家 389

Cordiner, Revd James, British writer 389

科尔多瓦 99

Córdoba 99

皮埃尔·高乃依，法国剧作家，410

Corneille, Pierre, French dramatist, 410

康沃利斯勋爵，孟加拉总督，498，506

Cornwallis, Lord, governor-general of Bengal, 498, 506

Corriente, Federico, 西班牙语言学家 99

Corriente, Federico, Spanish linguist 99

科尔特斯，埃尔南，西班牙征服者 1-4, 14-16, 339, 342-343, 351, 353 n , 355

Cortés, Hernán, Spanish conquistador 1-4, 14-16, 339, 342-343, 351, 353n, 355

西印度群岛理事会 374

Council of the Indies 374

美因茨市议会 318

Council of Mainz 318

旅游委员会 318

Council of Tours 318

特伦托会议374

Council of Trent 374

克里奥尔化 10, 292

Creolisation 10, 292

克里奥尔语390、415-116、444、455、508、575 n 63

Creoles 390, 415-116, 444, 455, 508, 575n63

克里特岛 236

Crete 236

克罗地亚人 430 n

Croats 430n

吕底亚国王克罗伊索斯（公元前41年）

Croesus, king of Lydia 41n

Crónica Mexicayotl 354

Crouset, F. 510, 575-576 n 65

Crouset, F. 510, 575-576n65

十字军东征 263, 407

Crusades 263, 407

克里斯特尔，大卫，英国语言学家 543

Crystal, David, British linguist 543

古巴 337, 346 n , 480

Cuba 337, 346n, 480

坎布里亚郡464

Cumbrian 464

楔形文字参见文字

Cuneiform see writing

康利夫，巴里，英国考古学家 290

Cunliffe, Barry, British archaeologist 290

Cursor Mundi 469

柯曾，乔治·N.，英国政治家 572 n 43

Curzon, George N., British statesman 572n43

库希特语系36, 98

Cushitic languages 36, 98

库斯科 356-358

Cuzco 356-358

塞浦路斯 44、71、236

Cyprus 44, 71, 236

波斯国王居鲁士 41 n , 47, 68, 80

Cyrus, king of Persia 41n, 47, 68, 80

捷克573 n 14

Czech 573n14

捷克人 430 n

Czechs 430n

达契亚310

Dacia 310

达尔马提亚 310

Dalmatia 310

Damascenus, Joannes, 希腊秘书 97

Damascenus, Joannes, Greek Secretary 97

大马士革 43、66、167、250

Damascus 43, 66, 167, 250

但以理，撒母耳记上 323

Daniel, Samuel 323

但丁·阿利吉耶里，意大利诗人 320

Dante Alighieri, Italian poet 320

波斯语达里语方言108

Dari dialect of Persian 108

波斯国王大流士 47-48, 57, 81, 85, 85 n , 108, 243, 356, 548

Darius, king of Persia 47-48, 57, 81, 85, 85n, 108, 243, 356, 548

《资本论》（马克思）438 n

Das Kapital (Marx) 438n

Dede Korkut，土耳其传统史诗 105

Dede Korkut, Turkish traditional epic 105

De Excidio Britonum (吉尔达斯) 311

De Excidio Britonum (Gildas) 311

德拉克鲁斯、弗雷·罗德里戈、西班牙修道士 364

De la Cruz, Fray Rodrigo, Spanish friar 364

罗伯特·卡维利尔·德拉萨尔，法国探险家 412, 520

De la Salle, Robert Cavelier, French explorer 412, 520

弗雷·巴托洛梅·德拉斯·卡萨斯 (De las Casas)，西班牙修道士 335, 365

De las Casas, Fray Bartolomé, Spanish friar 335, 365

戴马科斯，塞琉古大使 247

Deimakhos, Seleucid ambassador 247

德里苏丹国 108

Delhi Sultanate 108

丹麦 411

Denmark 411

驱逐出境 47、56、64-66、79-80、197、360、485、489、505；另见人口流动

Deportation 47, 56, 64-66, 79-80, 197, 360, 485, 489, 505; see also Population movement

北非荒漠化 37

Desertification of North Africa 37

笛卡尔，勒内，法国哲学家，公元409-410年

Descartes, René, French philosopher 409-410

迪亚科诺夫，伊戈尔，伊朗史前史专家，43岁

Diakonov, Igor, specialist on Iranian prehistory 43n

悲观主义对话录31

Dialogue of Pessimism 31

英语和马来语对话录（斯波尔丁）323

Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages (Spaulding) 323

西塞罗尼亚努斯对话（伊拉斯谟）329

Dialogus Ciceronianus (Erasmus) 329

巴尔托洛梅乌·迪亚斯，葡萄牙航海家 385

Dias, Bartolomeu, Portuguese navigator 385

迪亚斯·德尔·卡斯蒂利亚，伯纳尔，西班牙征服者 4 n

Díaz del Castilla, Bernal, Spanish conquistador 4n

奥尔良少女峰（席勒）446

Die Jungfrau von Orleans (Schiller) 446

双语现象（古典阿拉伯语及其方言）98，（希腊语和阿拉姆语）247

diglossia (classical Arabic and dialects) 98, (Greek and Aramaic) 247

Diodorus Siculus，希腊历史学家 272, 276

Diodorus Siculus, Greek historian 272, 276

色雷斯的狄奥尼修斯，希腊语法学家，238 n，247

Dionysius the Thracian, Greek grammarian 238n, 247

迪奥里，哈马尼，尼日利亚 420

Diori, Hamani, Nigerian 420

方法论（笛卡尔）409-410

Discours de la méthode (Descartes) 409-410

疾病参见流行病

Disease see Epidemics

德米特里·顿斯科伊，大王子 426

Dmitriy Donskoy, Grand Prince 426

堂吉诃德·德拉曼恰（塞万提斯）332

Don Quixote de la Mancha (Cervantes) 332

希腊语多利安方言235-236, 237 n

Doric dialect of Greek 235-236, 237n

多利安人 240

Dorians 240

陀思妥耶夫斯基，费奥多尔·米哈伊洛维奇，俄罗斯作家，422、437、439-440、442

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor M., Russian writer 422, 437, 439-440, 442

德雷克，弗朗西斯爵士，英国私掠船船长，478年

Drake, Sir Francis, English privateer 478

德拉维语系语言39、177、187、197

Dravidian languages 39, 177, 187, 197

德鲁伊 183, 302

Druids 183, 302

荷兰语325 n , 380, 395-403, 446, 539

Dutch 325n, 380, 395-403, 446, 539

作为basa Perteges 389 n

as basa Perteges389n

荷兰利益

Dutch interests

加尔文主义 400

Calvinism 400

以及中国 148-149

and China 148-149

东印度帝国 396-397 年，506 年

East Indian empire 396-397, 506

以及北美 482、486、492

and North America 482, 486, 492

以及葡萄牙语389、389 n、391-392、401

and Portuguese 389, 389n, 391-392, 401

荷兰东印度公司参见联合东印度公司（VOC）

Dutch East India Company see United East India Company (VOC)

荷兰归正教会 401

Dutch Reformed Church 401

东非 101、103-104、412、507-508

East Africa 101, 103-104, 412, 507-508

东亚 209、210 n、507

East Asia 209, 210n, 507

东印度公司 148、225、457、479、497-499、501、504、506、518-519、536、539

East India Company 148, 225, 457, 479, 497-499, 501, 504, 506, 518-519, 536, 539

东印度群岛 148、385、387、390-391、395 n、396-403、493、498

East Indies 148, 385, 387, 390-391, 395n, 396-403, 493, 498

东普鲁士 447

East Prussia 447

埃布拉 37、40、60

Ebla 37, 40, 60

埃布拉特40

Eblaite 40

埃德萨 87-88、90、247

Edessa 87-88, 90, 247

以东 83

Edom 83

以东人70, 71

Edomite 70, 71

埃杜巴，苏美尔学派 62-63

Edubba, Sumerian school 62-63

爱德华一世，英国国王，公元463年

Edward I, English king 463

埃格里亚 259

Egeria 259

埃及 34、39、41-42、45、46-48、62、71、76、79、86、420

Egypt 34, 39, 41-42, 45, 46-48, 62, 71, 76, 79, 86, 420

考古学 124-129

archaeology 124-129

野蛮人 163

barbarians 163

时间顺序图 117-122

chronological charts 117-122

希腊的统治 245, 248, 259-260

Greek overlordship 245, 248, 259-260

移民 163-167

immigration 163-167

入侵163-167，260

invasions 163-167, 260

多语种 165

multilingual 165

及邻近土地 123

and neighbouring lands 123

人口152-153、158、173、260

population 152-153, 158, 173, 260n

宗教 150-152、166-167、172

religion 150-152, 166-167, 172

赛特，《埃及和近东》130、165

Saite Egypt and the Near East 130, 165

交易158

trade 158

阿拉姆语的使用 83, 129-132

use of Aramaic 83, 129-132

埃及11 n , 12, 20-21, 36, 83, 90, 93, 97, 101, 113-117, 122-126, 129-132, 133-134, 149-153, 164-167, 248-250, 255, 292, 514, 517, 520

Egyptian 11n, 12, 20-21, 36, 83, 90, 93, 97, 101, 113-117, 122-126, 129-132, 133-134, 149-153, 164-167, 248-250, 255, 292, 514, 517, 520

象形文字 11 n , 34, 113-116, 121, 124-125, 128, 132-133, 154-158, 173

hieroglyphs 11n, 34, 113-116, 121, 124-125, 128, 132-133, 154-158, 173

埃及 （续）

Egyptian (cont.)

识字率 156、157

literacy 156, 157

中古埃及语113, 125

Middle Egyptian 113, 125

脚本 132、154-158

scripts 132, 154-158

另见文字、象形文字

see also writing, hieroglyphs

爱森斯坦，谢尔盖，俄罗斯电影导演 447 n

Eisenstein, Sergei, Russian film director 447n

埃拦 31, 35 n , 39, 42, 43, 46, 53, 60, 65, 87

Elam 31, 35n, 39, 42, 43, 46, 53, 60, 65, 87

埃兰语32, 35 n , 39-40, 50, 56-58, 60, 62

Elamite 32, 35n, 39-40, 50, 56-58, 60, 62

阿基坦的埃莉诺 407 n

Eleanor of Aquitaine 407n

Elegantiarum Libri (Valla) 27

Elimam, Abdou，阿尔及利亚语言学家 78 n

Elimam, Abdou, Algerian linguist 78n

埃利奥特，约翰，马萨诸塞州语言学家，484-485页

Eliot, John, Massachusetts linguist 484-485

艾略特，托马斯·斯蒂姆斯，诗人 456

Eliot, Thomas Steams, poet 456

艾丽莎 69，71

Elissa 69, 71

伊丽莎白一世 473、478

Elizabeth I 473, 478

埃梅吉尔苏美尔语方言52

Emegir dialect of Sumerian 52

苏美尔语埃梅萨尔方言（女性方言）52

Emesal dialect of Sumerian (women’s dialect) 52

埃默卡尔与阿拉塔之主 32

Emmerkar and the Lord of Aratta 32

英语

English

联合法案465

Act of Union 465

310-314 年的出现

advent of 310-314

将其与其他帝国语言进行了比较（516-521年）

compared its other imperial languages 516-521

盎格鲁-诺曼语460年，461-465年

Anglo-Norman 460n, 461-465

盎格鲁-撒克逊时期125、313、456、462、466、517

Anglo-Saxon 125, 313, 456, 462, 466, 517

特征 474-477

characteristics 474-477

伦敦腔406

Cockney 406

殖民语言 325 n

colonizing language 325n

方言 468-172

dialects 468-172

河口英语406, 514

Estuary English 406, 514

正式强化 464-465，468

formal reinforcement 464-465, 468

基础 24，24 n

foundation 24, 24n

语法 475-476

grammar 475-476

语言教学（ELT）513、521、554

Language Teaching (ELT) 513, 521, 554

以及拉丁文301-304、310-311、461、464、467、474 n

and Latin 301-304, 310-311, 461, 464, 467, 474n

法语法律468 n

Law French 468n

中古英语66 n , 125

Middle English 66n, 125

（诺曼）法语458-461、464、465-468、517

(Norman) French 458-461, 464, 465-468, 517

Norse 314, 447 n , 468

Norse 314, 447n, 468

古英语314 n , 475

Old English 314n, 475

与 476-477 年的相似之处

parallels to 476-477

海盗与种植园主 478-480

pirates and planters 478-480

可能的未来 541-549

possible futures 541-549

发音 425 n，474-476

pronunciation 425n, 474-476

牛津条例 466

Provisions of Oxford 466

标准发音 514

Received Pronunciation 514

第二语言使用者 515-516，575 n 63，576 n 3

second-language speakers 515-516, 575n63, 576n3

分布范围为 275、331、456-458、477-495、505-510、527-528

spread of 275, 331, 456-458, 477-495, 505-510, 527-528

标准 468-473、474

standard 468-473, 474

基尔肯尼法令 464-465

Statute of Kilkenny 464-465

《诉讼法》第467条

Statute of Pleading 467

英国地区方言514 n

UK regional dialects 514n

方言文学 461

vernacular literature 461

世界语言 7、13、20、103、179、378、380、476、510-517、525-533

world language 7, 13, 20, 103, 179, 378, 380, 476, 510-517, 525-533

英语作为全球语言（Crystal） 543

English as a Global Language (Crystal) 543

恩赫杜安娜，阿加德公主，苏美尔女诗人，51, 60

Enheduanna, princess of Agade and poetess in Sumerian, 51, 60

启蒙时代 374-375, 394 n , 448

Enlightenment era 374-375, 394n, 448

Ennius, Quintus，拉丁诗人，17, 252, 280, 299, 330 n

Ennius, Quintus, Latin poet, 17, 252, 280, 299, 330n

《埃努玛·埃利什》，巴比伦创世史诗，第61章

Enuma eliš, Babylonian creation epic 61

埃福罗斯，希腊历史学家，公元前276年

Ephorus, Greek historian 276

流行病学 336-338，506

Epidemics 336-338, 506

免疫程度 22-24，313

degrees of immunity 22-24, 313

警句（马提亚尔）523

Epigrams (Martial) 523

伊拉斯谟，德西德里乌斯，荷兰人文主义者 329

Erasmus, Desiderius, Dutch humanist 329

厄立特里亚 36

Eritrea 36

埃萨尔哈顿，83世纪国王

Esarhaddon, king 83

世界语171

Esperanto 171

爱沙尼亚 432-433、443、445

Estonia 432-433, 443, 445

埃塞俄比亚 36、80、92、387

Ethiopia 36, 80, 92, 387

埃塞俄比亚语（库什语）131

Ethiopian (language of Kush) 131

民族语412 n，576 n 2

Ethnologue 412n, 576n2

伊特鲁里亚人 45, 241-242, 285 n , 290

Etruscans 45, 241-242, 285n, 290

欧几里得，古希腊数学家，公元前182年

Euclid, Greek mathematician, 182

幼发拉底河 39, 40 n

Euphrates 39, 40n

欧里庇得斯，希腊剧作家，254 n，258，271

Euripides, Greek dramatist, 254n, 258, 271

欧洲 46、273、314

Europe 46, 273, 314

文化变迁 275

cultural change 275

但丁的语言图景 320

Dante’s linguistic picture 320

全球帝国 380

global empires 380

语言分布 274-275, 331

language distribution 274-275, 331

穆斯林入侵 306

Muslim invasion 306

印刷范围 326-327、472-473、540

spread of printing 326-327, 472-473, 540

欧盟 19 n , 515-516

European Union 19n, 515-516

优西比乌，《教会史》256

Eusebius, Church historian 256

摘录（Nennius）311

Excerpta (Nennius) 311

宁努尔塔的功绩55, 57-58

Exploits of Ninurta 55, 57-58

法显，中国朝圣者 159、193、201、207

Fa-Xian, Chinese pilgrim 159, 193, 201, 207

罗斯季斯拉夫·法捷耶夫，俄罗斯将军 434

Fadeyev, Rostislav, Russian general 434

Faliscan 242

法尔斯 43, 56

Fars 43, 56

波斯语（Farsi） 参见波斯语（Persia），语言

Farsi see Persia, language

法蒂玛王朝100年

Fatimid dynasty 100

费利佩二世（菲利普二世），西班牙国王，公元100年、340年、367年

Felipe (Philip) II, king of Spain 100, 340, 367

Felipillo，秘鲁翻译 342-343

Felipillo, Peruvian interpreter 342-343

芬尼 280

Fenni 280

费林吉 497

Feringhee 497

生育率参见人口增长

Fertility see Population growth

菲律宾语见他加禄语

Filipino see Tagalog

芬兰 423、432、433

Finland 423, 432, 433

弗斯，JR，英国语言学家 20-21

Firth, J.R., British linguist 20-21

Folangji（欧洲人）148

Folangji (Europeans) 148

Forjando Patria (Gamío) 375

佛头登，139号佛教僧侣

Fotudeng, Buddhist monk 139

法国12

France 12

以及天主教 408、415、416 n

and Catholicism 408, 415, 416n

殖民地 415-416、478、482、486、519-520

colonies 415-416, 478, 482, 486, 519-520

文化 407、409-410、511、514、520

culture 407, 409-410, 511, 514, 520

圣地飞地 408

enclaves in the Holy Land 408

第一帝国（411-416年）

first empire 411-416

新法国 412-414, 486, 492-495

Nouvelle-France 412-414, 486, 492-495

人口增长 407, 409

population growth 407, 409

革命416

Revolution 416

第二帝国时期（416-421年）

second empire 416-421

罗曼语族的变体405

varieties of Romance languages 405

法国，阿纳托尔，法国作家 403

France, Anatole, French writer 403

法国国王弗朗索瓦一世，326年、404年、519年在位

François I, king of France 326, 404, 519

Franks 20、275、306-307、316、400、404、457

Franks 20, 275, 306-307, 316, 400, 404, 457

自由企业 339、457-458、479、481-482、496、513、519、550

Free enterprise 339, 457-458, 479, 481-482, 496, 513, 519, 550

言论自由 549-550

Freedom of speech 549-550

法语179、300、331、405-406、472

French 179, 300, 331, 405-406, 472

殖民语言 325 n , 380, 400, 411-414, 446, 528-533

colonizing language 325n, 380, 400, 411-414, 446, 528-533

克里奥尔语415-416

Creole 415-416

以及外交 410-411

and diplomacy 410-411

欧洲 404-411

in Europe 404-411

法语国家403、420-421、532、535、540

La francophonie 403, 420-421, 532, 535, 540

诺曼法语458-461、464、465-468；另见 盎格鲁-诺曼语

Norman French 458-461, 464, 465-468 see also Anglo-Norman

Villers-Cotterěts 条例 404、409

Ordinance of Villers-Cotterěts 404, 409

撤退 407 n

retreat of 407n

罗曼语系 404-405, 529

Romance language 404-405, 529

排版 472

typography 472

法属赤道非洲 418

French Equatorial Africa 418

法属圭亚那 416

French Guiana 416

法属西非 418

French West Africa 418

腓特烈二世 337

Friedrich II 337

弗里斯兰 313, 456

Friesland 313, 456

扶南 204, 217

Funan 204, 217

加布里埃尔二世，东正教宗主教，公元92年

Gabriel II, Orthodox Patriarch 92

加兹登购地 574 n 17

Gadsden Purchase 574n17

盖尔语 参见 爱尔兰语

Gaelic see Irish

加拉太书 293-294

Galatians 293-294

加利西亚（乌克兰西部）432

Galicia (west of Ukraine) 432

西班牙加利西亚语332、382、384

Galician language of Spain 332, 382, 384

加利利 86-87

Galilee 86-87

高卢-希腊语 287, 293-294

Gallo-Greek 287, 293-294

瓦斯科·伽马 (Gama)，葡萄牙水手 385

Gama, Vasco de, Portuguese mariner 385

冈比亚 508

Gambia 508

加米奥，M.，墨西哥爱国者 375

Gamío, M., Mexican patriot 375

犍陀罗 85

Gandhara 85

加西拉索，印加见维加，加西拉索·德拉

Garcilaso, Inca see Vega, Garcilaso de la

Gaspirali（Gasprinsky），Ismail Bey 440-441

Gaspirali (Gasprinsky), Ismail Bey 440-441

高卢语 24 n、274、282、285-288、289-295、299、301-304、404

Gaulish 24n, 274, 282, 285-288, 289-295, 299, 301-304, 404

高卢罗马铭文 287

Gallo-Roman inscriptions 287

高卢人 183、241、243、276

Gauls 183, 241, 243, 276

罗马帝国灭亡（公元305-307年）

end of Roman empire 305-307

入侵事件 292-293

incursions 292-293

罗马征服（公元301-302年，556年）

Roman conquest 301-302, 556

拉丁语传播 304

spread of Latin 304

另见凯尔特人

see also Celts

吉兹语36、92、255

Ge’ez 36, 92, 255

成吉思汗（Chinggiz Khan），蒙古征服者，生卒年不详，公元106年、142年、151年、425年、555年。

Genghis (Chinggiz) Khan, Mongol conqueror 106, 142, 151, 425, 555

蒙茅斯的杰弗里，英国编年史家，公元前459年

Geoffrey of Monmouth, British chronicler 459n

格鲁吉亚（俄罗斯）433-435, 442

Georgia (Russia) 433-435, 442

乔治亚人 50

Georgians 50

吉皮德斯310

Gepids 310

日耳曼尼亚（塔西佗）273, 277, 280, 288

Germania (Tacitus) 273, 277, 280, 288

日耳曼语系273, 277 n , 278, 289 n , 307, 314, 318, 320 n , 400, 475

Germanic languages 273, 277n, 278, 289n, 307, 314, 318, 320n, 400, 475

很少传播 306-308、400、447

have not often spread 306-308, 400, 447

日耳曼人入侵（304-309年）

Germanic invasions 304-309

德国317、446-449、472-473、573页脚注13

German 317, 446-449, 472-473, 573n13

殖民语言 325 n , 492 n

colonizing language 325n, 492n

低地德语312

Low German 312

世界语言 404 n , 528-529, 531

world language 404n, 528-529, 531

德国 12, 274, 277-278

Germany 12, 274, 277-278

图书出版 326, 412-413

book-publishing 326, 412-413

殖民地 448、508

colonies 448, 508

以及北美 492

and North America 492

加纳 508

Ghana 508

吉布森，亨利，美国喜剧演员 541

Gibson, Henry, US comedian 541

吉尔伯特，汉弗莱，英国企业家 482

Gilbert, Humphrey, English entrepreneur 482

吉尔达斯，英国编年史家 311

Gildas, British chronicler 311

吉尔伽美什史诗 61

Gilgamesh Epic 61

全球导航 538-541

Global navigation 538-541

诺斯替教派 90 n

Gnostic sect 90n

盖尔语系291

Goidelic languages 291

Gök-Tepe（陀思妥耶夫斯基）421-422

Gök-Tepe (Dostoyevsky) 421-422

金牌 1、51、58、61、127、158、160、201、227、272、293、349、350、357、382、392、394、398、426、480、482、495、511、548

Gold 1, 51, 58, 61, 127, 158, 160, 201, 227, 272, 293, 349, 350, 357, 382, 392, 394, 398, 426, 480, 482, 495, 511, 548

金帐汗国 106, 426-427

Golden Horde 106, 426-427

淘金热（巴西）394，（加利福尼亚）495，574 n 28

Gold rush (Brazil) 394, (California) 495, 574n28

乱世佳人（米切尔）490

Gone with the Wind (Mitchell) 490

哥特式20、22、307

Gothic 20, 22, 307

哥特人 261、400、457

Goths 261, 400, 457

大卫·格拉多 515, 516 n , 544 n

Graddol, David 515, 516n, 544n

希腊罗马 191, 293

Graeco-Roman 191, 293

Gramalica de la lenguacastellana（内布里哈）331

Gramalica de la lengua castellana (Nebrija) 331

Grammatica Germanicae linguae (Clajus) 573 n 13

Grammatica Germanicae linguae (Clajus) 573n13

格拉纳达 99, 332-333

Granada 99, 332-333

格兰特，查尔斯，英国改革家 501

Grant, Charles, British reformer 501

希腊 39, 40 n

Greece 39, 40n

以及野蛮人 230、232、241 n、279、423

and barbarians 230, 232, 241n, 279, 423

基督教正统派 264, 269-270

Christian Orthodoxy 264, 269-270

文明 233、268、520

civilisation 233, 268, 520

硬币 246-247、249、258

coins 246-247, 249, 258

菌落 239-243、245-247

colonies 239-243, 245-247

文化 233、235-238、241-242、245、248、250-254、257、266-268、271、298

culture 233, 235-238, 241-242, 245, 248, 250-254, 257, 266-268, 271, 298

衰落/复兴 257-263、265-266、267-268、300、328

decline/revival 257-263. 265-266, 267-268, 300, 328

移民 262-263

emigration 262-263

对罗马的迷恋 278-279

fascination with Rome 278-279

希腊语231

Héllēnes 231

希腊232

Hellēnikón 232

希腊化 245, 247-249

Hellenisation 245, 247-249

影响 229、232-233、241-242、298-299

influence 229, 232-233, 241-242, 298-299

奥运会232

Olympic games 232

罗马规则252

Roman rule 252

斯拉夫人入侵 261-262、264、309、314

Slav incursions 261-262, 264, 309, 314

交易 242

trade 242

土耳其统治时期（264-266年）

Turkish domination 264-266

另见亚历山大大帝

see also Alexander the Great

希腊文12, 20-22, 24 n , 48, 49, 53, 71, 111, 120, 122, 179, 227-229, 234-238, 241, 248, 264-265, 269-270, 320 n , 328, 555

Greek 12, 20-22, 24n, 48, 49, 53, 71, 111, 120, 122, 179, 227-229, 234-238, 241, 248, 264-265, 269-270, 320n, 328, 555

字母表 156、242、251

alphabet 156, 242, 251

以及阿拉伯语96-97

and Arabic 96-97

阿提卡方言229-230

Attic dialect 229-230

双语现象 246、249、251-252、258

bilingualism 246, 249, 251-252, 258

借词 269-270

borrowing words 269-270

特征 234-238

characteristics 234-238

Scaliger 277 n分类

classification by Scaliger 277n

方言 232、235-237

dialects 232, 235-237

以及埃及 129-134、164-166

and Egypt 129-134, 164-166

高卢铭文 286-287

Gaulish inscriptions 286-287

语法 180, 182, 235, 238 n , 476

grammar 180, 182, 235, 238n, 476

铭文 83-84、240、242、247、249、258

inscriptions 83-84, 240, 242, 247, 249, 258

文学遗产 254-257，575 n 48

literary heritage 254-257, 575n48

新约87

New Testament 87

以及克利奥帕特拉女王 131 n

and Queen Cleopatra 131n

梵文190-192

and Sanskrit 190-192

脚本 173、241

scripts 173, 241

76-78、86、96、108、229-230、238、239-254、490 的分布

spread of 76-78, 86, 96, 108, 229-230, 238, 239-254, 490

世界语言 229-230

world language 229-230

图尔的格雷戈里，法兰克历史学家 315

Gregory of Tours, Frankish historian 315

Grijalva, Juan de，西班牙探险家 348, 349

Grijalva, Juan de, Spanish explorer 348, 349

瓜德罗普 415

Guadeloupe 415

广州（Canton）159-160, 334

Guangzhou (Canton) 159-160, 334

瓜拉尼349, 361-364, 370-371, 376, 393

Guaraní 349, 361-364, 370-371, 376, 393

危地马拉 183、337、339、372

Guatemala 183, 337, 339, 372

古布拉参见比布鲁斯

Gubla see Byblos

拉格什的古地亚 58

Gudea of Lagash 58

古尔卡利 176

Gurkhali 176

古鲁·格兰特·萨希卜216

Guru Granth Sahib 216

约翰内斯·古腾堡，德国印刷先驱，326

Gutenberg, Johannes, German printing pioneer 326

古古·伊米迪尔4

Guugu Yimidhirr 4

哈比鲁42, 70, 111

Habiru 42, 70, 111

哈布斯堡王朝 448

Habsburg dynasty 448

海特 4151

Haite 4151

客家话（汉语方言） 147

Hakka dialect of Chinese 147

哈克卢伊特，理查德，英国公关人员 479

Hakluyt, Richard, English publicist 479

火腿 35 n

Ham 35n

哈马丹 43

Hamadan 43

闪米特语系36、97、122

Hamito-Semitic languages 36, 97, 122

汉谟拉比，巴比伦国王，公元53年、61年

Hammurabi, king of Babylonia 53, 61

汉代 118、138、140、169

Hàn dynasty 118, 138, 140, 169

杭州151

Hangzhou 151

汉尼拔，迦太基将军 77, 252, 294

Hannibal, Carthaginian general 77, 252, 294

汉诺，迦太基探险家 75

Hanno, Carthaginian explorer 75

哈伦·拉希德，哈里发98

Harūn al-Rashid, Caliph 98

哈斯蒙尼王国公元前248年

Hasmonaean kingdom 248

沃伦·黑斯廷斯，孟加拉总督，497

Hastings, Warren, governor-general of Bengal 497

哈特谢普苏特，女法老 151 n

Hatshepsut, female pharaoh 151n

Hattic 41，41 n

Hattic 41, 41n

Hattusas 41, 61-62

豪萨语36, 97 n , 101, 102 n , 527 n , 530

Hausa 36, 97n, 101, 102n, 527n, 530

夏威夷 509-510

Hawaii 509-510

希伯来文78-80、93、335、520 n、537

Hebrew 78-80, 93, 335, 520n, 537

以及阿拉伯语110-111

and Arabic 110-111

考古发现 32

archaeological finds 32

复制文本 78

copied texts 78

驱逐出境 65、79-80

deportations 65, 79-80

数字命理学传统 217

gematria tradition 217

语法 68 n

grammar 68n

希腊文本 248

Greek texts 248

语言生存 80 n , 90, 93, 110, 217

language survival 80n, 90, 93, 110, 217

语言统一性 20

linguistic unity 20

礼仪用途 248

liturgical use 248

犹太人口：42、44、164、166、247、537

people (Jews) 42, 44, 164, 166, 247, 537

发音 68 n , 70, 73

pronunciation 68n, 70, 73

以及克利奥帕特拉女王 131

and Queen Cleopatra 131

相关/相似语言 35 n , 50, 60 n , 70

relative/similar languages 35n, 50, 60n, 70

经文

scriptures

列王纪下65

2 Kings 65

但以理书82

Daniel 82

埃丝特81

Esther 81

以西结书68 n，73-74

Ezekiel 68n, 73-74

以斯拉记80 n , 82

Ezra 80n, 82

创世记58、73

Genesis 58, 73

以赛亚书79

Isaiah 79

耶利米书81、84

Jeremiah 81, 84

尼希米记80章

Nehemiah 80n

诗篇80

Psalms 80

赫利奥多鲁斯，希腊大使 192, 247

Heliodorus, Greek ambassador 192, 247

赫利奥波利斯 127

Heliopolis 127

埃卢，查尔斯 420

Hélou, Charles 420

Helvetii 286, 293

亨利二世，英国国王，公元460年，公元464年

Henry II, English king 460n, 464

航海家亨利，葡萄牙王子，公元382年、385年

Henry the Navigator, Portuguese prince 382, 385

亨利八世，英国国王，公元465年、478年

Henry VIII, English king 465, 478

赫拉克利特，哲学家 234

Heraclitus, philosopher 234

希拉克略，皇帝，公元260-261年

Heraclius, emperor 260-261

埃尔南德斯·德·科尔多瓦，弗朗西斯科，西班牙征服者 348, 349

Hernández de Córdoba, Francisco, Spanish conquistador 348, 349

希罗多德 31, 130 n , 228, 232, 243, 276, 335

Herodotus 31, 130n, 228, 232, 243, 276, 335

赫西俄德 182, 236

Hesiod 182, 236

希西家，犹大王（公元78-79年）

Hezekiah, king of Judah 78-79

象形文字参见文字

hieroglyphs see writing

希格登，拉努夫，英国编年史家，467

Higden, Ranulph, English chronicler 467

希尔德布兰德之歌273

Hildebrandslied 273

印地语177-178、223、528-530、536；另见 乌尔都语

Hindi 177-178, 223, 528-530, 536; see also Urdu

印度教 21, 175, 178-180, 196, 198, 199, 202, 206, 207, 209, 214, 217, 220-221, 225, 504

Hinduism 21, 175, 178-180, 196, 198, 199, 202, 206, 207, 209, 214, 217, 220-221, 225, 504

伊斯帕尼奥拉岛 337-338、343、346 n

Hispaniola 337-338, 343, 346n

西班牙化373-377

Hispanización 373-377

奇奇梅卡历史(Ixtilxóchitl) 344

Historia Chichimeca (Ixtilxóchitl) 344

Historia Francorum（图尔的格雷戈里）315

Historia Francorum (Gregory of Tours) 315

赫梯24 n , 31, 33, 39, 41, 44, 46, 50, 62, 67, 84, 196, 514

Hittite 24n, 31, 33, 39, 41, 44, 46, 50, 62, 67, 84, 196, 514

苗族134, 141

Hmong 134, 141

葛饰北斋，日本艺术家 22

Hokusai, Katsushika, Japanese artist 22

神圣罗马帝国 411 年、447-448 年

Holy Roman Empire 411, 447-448

荷马，希腊诗人 44 n , 231-232, 236, 237 n , 251, 474 n

Homer, Greek poet 44n, 231-232, 236, 237n, 251, 474n

香港 149,507

Hong Kong 149, 507

贺拉斯，罗马诗人，公元前250年

Horace, Roman poet 250

侯赛因汗，Sied Gholam，莫卧儿历史学家 496

Hossein Khan, Sied Gholam, Mughal historian 496

华斯特克346、355

Huastec 346, 355

胡格诺派教徒 409, 412

Huguenots 409, 412

胡纳106

Hūna 106

匈牙利语 309 n

Hungarian 309n

Hunni 106, 139 n

Hunni 106, 139n

匈奴入侵，时间分别为公元261年、306年、309年和555年。

Huns, invasions by 261, 306, 309, 555

休伦412北

Huron 412n

飓风33、39、41、50、62、196

Hurrian 33, 39, 41, 50, 62, 196

希克索斯国王 119、164

Hyksos kings 119, 164

我要赞美智慧之主30

I will Praise the Lord of Wisdom 30

扬布利科斯，希腊小说家，68岁

Iamblikhos, Greek novelist 68n

伊姆哈德（阿勒颇）41

Iamhad (Aleppo) 41

伊比利亚航空 45、99、290、299、301、307、382

Iberia 45, 99, 290, 299, 301, 307, 382

伊本·豪卡尔，阿拉伯历史学家，98

Ibn Hauqal, Arabic historian 98

伊本·赫勒敦，阿拉伯旅行作家，100

Ibn Khaldūn, Arabic travel writer 100

伊本·瓦哈卜，158年访问中国的阿拉伯人

Ibn Wahab, Arab visitor to China 158

冰岛 314, 447北

Iceland 314, 447n

伊卡363

Ika 363

《伊利亚特》 44 n，231，236

Iliad 44n, 231, 236

移民参见人口流动

Immigration see Population movement

帝国语言

Imperial languages

传播原因 380-381、446、576 n 70

reasons for spread 380-381, 446, 576n70

生存原因 444 446

reasons for survival 444 446

伊南娜 49、51-52、55

Inanna 49, 51-52, 55

印加人 12、21、338、342-343、344-345、348、356-357、360、372-373、377

Incas 12, 21, 338, 342-343, 344-345, 348, 356-357, 360, 372-373, 377

禁书索引326

Index Librorum Prohibitorum 326

印度 34、38

India 34, 38

阿拉伯语入门

Arabic 101

双语现象 497

bilingualism 497

英国/英语12、19、108、187、223-225、496-505 和中国 147、159、192-194、506

and Britain/English 12, 19, 108, 187, 223-225, 496-505 and China 147, 159, 192-194, 506

文明 202-207，222-226

civilisation 202-207, 222-226

文化 179、180

culture 179, 180

人口统计数据 530

demographics 530

天城文 223

Devanāgari script 223

英语教育 499-505

English education 499-505

法国殖民地 416

French colonies 416

以及希腊语190-192

and Greek 190-192

希腊战役 245

Greek campaigns 245

现代雅利安语系177

modern Aryan languages 177

穆斯林入侵 212-213年，222年

Muslim invasions 212-213, 222

波斯语99、108、187、223、497、503 和葡萄牙语贸易 334、391、399、497

Persian language 99, 108, 187, 223, 497, 503 and Portuguese trade 334, 391, 399, 497

新教 499-504

Protestantism 499-504

英语传播 503-505；第二语言使用者 515

spread of English 503-505; second-language speakers 515

交易 199-207，536

trade 199-207, 536

另见梵语

see also Sanskrit

印度洋 416-417、419、446

Indian Ocean 416-417, 419, 446

印度文字 85 n , 156, 202-203, 211-212, 223, 246

Indic scripts 85n, 156, 202-203, 211-212, 223, 246

印迪卡（麦加斯梯尼）191

Indiká (Megasthenes) 191

印度-雅利安语系41,196

Indo-Aryan languages 41, 196

印度支那 178、203、206、207、215-216、380、400、413、417-419、520

Indo-China 178, 203, 206, 207, 215-216, 380, 400, 413, 417-419, 520

印欧语系23 n , 41, 42-43, 183, 195-196, 214, 289, 292, 301, 554-555

Indo-European languages 23n, 41, 42-43, 183, 195-196, 214, 289, 292, 301, 554-555

印度-希腊语 192, 257-258

Indo-Greeks 192, 257-258

印度-伊朗语系176

Indo-Iranian languages 176

印度-葡萄牙克里奥尔语390

Indo-Portuguese Creole 390

印度尼西亚, 147号, 161, 191, 380, 400, 403, 506号, 532

Indonesia, 147n, 161, 191, 380, 400, 403, 506n, 532

Indradevi，柬埔寨王后 206

Indradevi, Cambodian queen 206

因苏布里人 285-286, 288

Insubrians 285-286, 288

译员 3、75、82、131、192、335、341-343、344、355、357、363、365、388、440、497

Interpreters 3, 75, 82, 131, 192, 335, 341-343, 344, 355, 357, 363, 365, 388, 440, 497

跨种族家庭 308、313、343-344、376、414

Interracial families 308, 313, 343-344, 376, 414

另见梅斯蒂索人

see also Mestizo

拉丁语简介（内布里哈）345

Introductiones Latinae (Nebrija) 345

投资参见贸易

Investment see Trade

伊尼奥特夫，法老127

Inyotef, pharaoh 127

希腊语爱奥尼亚方言236, 237 n , 242 n

Ionic dialect of Greek 236, 237n, 242n

爱奥尼亚人书 236, 237 n

Ionians 236, 237n

伊普韦尔，《劝诫录》 163-164

Ipuwer, Admonitions of 163-164

伊拉克利，格鲁吉亚卡塔利娜-卡赫蒂亚国王 434

Irakli, Georgian king of Kartalina-Kakhetia 434

伊朗 21、38、43、47-48、86、96、257

Iran 21, 38, 43, 47-48, 86, 96, 257

以及阿拉伯语98、101

and Arabic 98, 101

另见帕提亚，波斯

see also Parthia, Persian

伊朗语109、186、219、246、258

Iranian languages 109, 186, 219, 246, 258

伊拉克 35，55

Iraq 35, 55

爱尔兰 290-291, 518

Ireland 290-291, 518

移民美国 491

emigration to America 491

以及诺曼人 464

and the Normans 464

北欧语447 n

Norse language 447n

瘟疫313

plague 313

基尔肯尼法令 464

Statute of Kilkenny 464

爱任纽（圣人），基督教护教士，公元299年

Irenaeus (Saint), Christian apologist 299

爱尔兰语（盖尔语） 274、276、300、464-465、469、517

Irish (Gaelic) 274, 276, 300, 464-465, 469, 517

伊西斯 255

Isis 255

伊斯兰教 22、49、94、96

Islam 22, 49, 94, 96

阿拉伯文字 97 n

Arabic script 97n

辅助语言 106

auxiliary languages 106

西班牙禁止333

banned by Spain 333

传播范围为 10、95、98-99、101、108、110-111、134、158、159、164、209、213、216、307 n、377、537

spread of 10, 95, 98-99, 101, 108, 110-111, 134, 158, 159, 164, 209, 213, 216, 307n, 377, 537

卡拉克斯的伊西多鲁斯，希腊旅行作家，公元258年

Isidorus of Charax, Greek travel writer 258

意大利语331、528-529、531

Italian 331, 528-529, 531

意大利语273, 291 n

Italic languages 273, 291n

意大利 240-242

Italy 240-242

以及法国410

and French 410

以及拉丁文12、293-294、535

and Latin 12, 293-294, 535

人口 153，153 n

population 153, 153n

罗曼语系320

Romance languages 320

另见奥斯坎

see also Oscan

伊凡三世，沙皇426-427年

Ivan III, Tsar 426-427

伊凡四世（“恐怖伊凡”），沙皇426-427年、431年、440年

Ivan IV (’the Terrible’), Tsar 426-427, 431, 440

Ixtilxóchitl，费尔南多·德·阿尔瓦，纳瓦特尔历史学家，344

Ixtilxóchitl, Fernando de Alva, Nahuatl historian, 344

耆那教 189-190

Jainism 189-190

詹姆斯敦 477 n , 479

Jamestown 477n, 479

日本

Japan

佛教 178

Buddhism 178

以及中国 147-148、162

and China 147-148, 162

殖民战争（公元450-453年）

colonial wars 450-453

人口统计数据 530

demographics 530

以及荷兰贸易 398

and Dutch trade 398

古民家 449-455

Kōminka 449-455

以及韩国 450-452

and Korea 450-452

太平洋帝国 451

Pacific empire 451

人口 153 n

population 153n

葡萄牙贸易站 387

Portuguese trading posts 387

俄罗斯 433, 452

and Russia 433, 452

日文46 n , 138, 528

Japanese 46n, 138, 528

五十音图 116, 156, 210-211

kana syllabary 116, 156, 210-211

kanbun传统 476 n

kanbun tradition 476n

传播范围 450、453-455

spread 450, 453-455

中日战争162-163

Sino-Japanese 162-163

Jaqaru 357

Jaqi 357

术语 10

jargons 10

本生经故事201、208

Jataka tales 201, 208

爪哇 147, 149, 201, 203, 204 n , 205-206, 213, 389, 398-399, 402, 564 n 30

Java 147, 149, 201, 203, 204n, 205-206, 213, 389, 398-399, 402, 564n30

爪哇语208、498、514、528、532

Javanese 208, 498, 514, 528, 532

杰斐逊，托马斯，美国总统，第488任

Jefferson, Thomas, US President 488

Jérez, Rodrigo de，西班牙语翻译 335

Jérez, Rodrigo de, Spanish interpreter 335

杰罗姆（又名希罗尼穆斯）（圣人），圣经译者，公元294年

Jerome (also Hieronymus) (Saint), Bible translator 294

耶路撒冷 79-80、129、248

Jerusalem 79-80, 129, 248

拿撒勒人耶稣，犹太先知（公元86-87年）

Jesus of Nazareth, Jewish prophet 86-87

杰文斯，斯坦利 511

Jevons, Stanley 511

犹太人视希伯来语

Jews see Hebrew

希门尼斯·德·克萨达，贡萨洛，西班牙征服者 363

Jiménez de Quesada, Gonzalo, Spanish conquistador 363

景颇134

Jingpo 134

以弗所的约翰，拜占庭历史学家，262年

John of Ephesus, Byzantine historian, 262

索尔兹伯里的约翰，英国僧侣，公元408年

John of Salisbury, English monk 408

柔佛 148

Johore 148

路易·若利埃，法国探险家，412

Jolliet, Louis, French explorer 412

琼斯爵士，威廉，英国学者，185，224

Jones, Sir William, English scholar 185, 224

约瑟夫斯，犹太历史学家 71

Josephus, Jewish historian 71

犹大王约西亚（公元129年）

Josiah, king of Judah 129

中国使节鞠颖147

Ju Ying, Chinese envoy 147

犹太 248

Judaea 248

犹大书 78-79、81、83、129

Judah 78-79, 81, 83, 129

犹太教 21, 70, 159, 306 n , 537

Judaism 21, 70, 159, 306n, 537

犹大·马加比，犹太革命家，公元248年

Judas Maccabaeus, Jewish revolutionary 248

朱迪思，犹太女英雄 69-70

Judith, Jewish heroine 69-70

于尔兴 120, 142, 143, 144, 153

Jürchen 120, 142, 143, 144, 153

查士丁尼，拜占庭皇帝，公元132年、233年、257年、260年

Justinian, Byzantine emperor 132n, 233, 257, 260

尤维纳利斯，罗马讽刺作家，280、302

Juvenal, Roman satirist 280, 302

卡巴德-巴尔卡尔423 n

Kabard-Balkar 423n

卡菲尔人 262

Kafirs 262

卡尔胡也称尼姆鲁德 66

Kalhu also Nimrud 66

迦梨陀娑，梵语诗人，公元559年

Kālidāsa, Sanskrit poet 559

卡林加 197-198, 199

Kalinga 197-198, 199

卡尔梅克423 n

Kalmyk 423n

卡利亚纳 88

Kalyana 88

爱经（Vatsyāyana）176

Kāma Sūtra (Vatsyāyana) 176

坎大哈 85, 246

Kandahar 85, 246

康泰，中国使节147

Kang Tai, Chinese envoy 147

贵霜国王迦腻色迦（公元219年）

Kanishka, king of Kushana 219

卡纳达语177、187-188、198

Kannada 177, 187-188, 198

井上薰，日本外相 450

Kaoru, Inoue, Japanese foreign minister 450

喀喇昆仑 90

Karakorum 90

凯伦134

Karen 134

Karkemish 39, 41

卡尔格伦，伯恩哈德，瑞典语言学家 163

Karlgren, Bernhard, Swedish linguist 163

卡塔利娜-卡赫季亚 434

Kartalina-Kakhetia 434

克什米尔 97 n , 178

Kashmir 97n, 178

卡西特 40, 41, 43, 55, 60, 63

Kassites 40, 41, 43, 55, 60, 63

Kathasaritsāgaram（Somadeva）201

Kathāsaritsāgaram (Somadeva) 201

印度探险家考恩迪尼亚 4

Kaunndinya, Indian explorer 4

卡瓦菲斯，康斯坦丁，希腊诗人 228

Kavafis, Constantine, Greek poet 228

梵语诗人卡维拉贾（Kavirāja），公元184年

Kavirāja, Sanskrit poet 184

Kawki 357

哈萨克斯坦 423n 、 435、443、445、547

Kazakhstan 423n, 435, 443, 445, 547

喀山 106、427、440

Kazan 106, 427, 440

肯尼亚 105、508、532、544

Kenya 105, 508, 532, 544

喀拉拉邦 88

Kerala 88

戴维·基斯，英国历史学家 313

Keys, David, British historian 313

佉卢文 85 n , 246

Kharoshthi script 85n, 246

哈扎尔人 106、306、425、555

Khazars 106, 306, 425, 555

契丹 120、142、153

Khitan 120, 142, 153

希瓦 437

Khiva 437

高棉语 202-203，208

Khmer 202-203, 208

科伊22

Khoi 22

赫鲁晓夫，尼基塔，苏联领导人 437

Khrushchev, Nikita, Soviet leader 437

呼罗珊 98

Khurasan 98

胡齐斯坦 57

Khuzistan 57

花剌子模48

Khwarezmian 48

基辅 106、426、431

Kiev 106, 426, 431

钦察-波洛维茨人 425

Kipchak-Polovtsians 425

基尔库克 41

Kirkuk 41

柯克伍德，蒙塔古，英国外交官，453年

Kirkwood, Montague British diplomat 453n

基什 27, 37

Kish 27, 37

克林，印度，东南亚人所熟知的199

Kling, India as known by South-East Asians 199

科吉州 363

Kogi 363

浩罕437

Kokand 437

古民家（帝国化）449-455年

Kōminka (imperialization) 449-455

孔卡尼390 n

Konkani 390n

古兰经（参见《古兰经》）

Koran see Qur’an

韩国 162, 423 n , 450-453

Korea 162, 423n, 450-453

佛教 178

Buddhism 178

以及日本380

and Japan 380

韩文46 n , 138, 156, 528-529, 576 n 12

Korean 46n, 138, 156, 528-529, 576n12

字母表 156

alphabet 156

汉朝162-163

Sino-Korean 162-163

克里奥克里奥尔语英语508

Krio Creole of English 508

克里斯坦葡萄牙语方言390

Kristang dialect of Portuguese 390

忽必烈汗，中国皇帝 143, 156, 179, 212 n

Kublai (Khubilai) Khan, emperor of China 143, 156, 179, 212n

鸠摩罗什，印度佛教翻译家 119

Kumārajīva, Indian Buddhist translator 119

贵霜帝国 48n , 108, 219, 246, 257-8, 269

Kushana empire 48n, 108, 219, 246, 257-8, 269

库什特126-129, 131 n

Kushite 126-129, 131n

库什特王朝 120, 127, 158, 164

Kushite dynasty 120, 127, 158, 164

《库塔德古·比利格》，突厥语说教诗106

Kutadgū Bilig, Turkic didactic poem 106

吉尔吉斯斯坦 437, 547

Kyrgyzstan 437, 547

拉格曼 85

Laghman 85

Lampridius, Aelius，罗马历史学家 299

Lampridius, Aelius, Roman historian 299

兰达，迭戈·德，西班牙神职人员，348年

Landa, Diego de, Spanish cleric 348n

语言魅力 21-22、86-93、179

Language charisma 21-22, 86-93, 179

语言社区 7-10、525、557

Language communities 7-10, 525, 557

语言多样性 471, 557-559

Language diversity 471, 557-559

语言动态 529-533，558

Language dynamics 529-533, 558

语言增长

Language growth

有机物 19、527-528、530-1

organic 19, 527-528, 530-1

“并购”（M&A）19、24、527

’merger and acquisition’ (M&A) 19, 24, 527

前二十名 19 n，525-533

Top Twenty 19n, 525-533

比帝国还要庞大 556-559 年

vaster than empires 556-559

语言史 5、7-25、51

Language history 5, 7-25, 51

24-25世纪的主要时期

major epochs 24-25

语言能力丧失

Language loss

（布匿语）76-77，（希伯来语）79-80，（埃及语）164-167，（高卢语）299-301，（马萨诸塞语）485，（北美语言）489-490

(Punic) 76-77, (Hebrew) 79-80, (Egyptian) 164-167, (Gaulish) 299-301, (Massachusett) 485, (North American languages) 489-490

语言混合参见克里奥尔化

Language mixing see creolisation

语言声望 19, 532, 550-552

Language prestige 19, 532, 550-552

语言属性 23

Language properties 23

语言规模分布 527

Language size distribution 527

语言传播（另见帝国语言），由军事征服造成 20-21、85、195-199、243、294、339、416、422、46-461、520、557

Language spread (see also Imperial languages), caused by military conquest 20-21, 85, 195-199, 243, 294, 339, 416, 422, 46-461, 520, 557

受文化影响 22-24、179、250、499、504、521、539、557

caused by cultural influence 22-24, 179, 250, 499, 504, 521, 539, 557

由第22、63-67、141、239、347、391-392、399、416、492-495、534-535、557号和地块的和解引起

caused by settlement 22, 63-67, 141, 239, 347, 391-392, 399, 416, 492-495, 534-535, 557

由技术创新引起 61-68、326-328、511-513、540-541、546、548

caused by technical innovation 61-68, 326-328, 511-513, 540-541, 546, 548

语言传播（续）

Language spread (cont.)

由贸易引起的 21-22、75-77、98、102-103、160-162、178、274、290-292、387-388、463、478、491、497、510-511、513、517-519、536、546

caused by trade 21-22, 75-77, 98, 102-103, 160-162, 178, 274, 290-292, 387-388, 463, 478, 491, 497, 510-511, 513, 517-519, 536, 546

宗教皈依所致 21-22, 86-93, 179, 387-390, 499 n , 501-502, 504, 520, 521, 536-537

caused by religious conversion 21-22, 86-93, 179, 387-390, 499n, 501-502, 504, 520, 521, 536-537

机制：

mechanisms of:

迁移：扩散：渗透 19、85、250

migration: diffusion: infiltration 19, 85, 250

扫除式教育 vs. 再教育 505-509

sweep-aside vs re-education 505-509

海上联系 24、199-202、323、325、338-339、538-539

seaborne contacts 24, 199-202, 323, 325, 338-339, 538-539

障碍：364-367，400-401

obstacles to: 364-367, 400-401

语言结构类型

Language structural type

作为语言传播的一个因素 23, 97, 552-557

as factor in language spread 23, 97, 552-557

语言存续（另见帝国语言）22-23、444-446、529

Language survival (see also Imperial languages) 22-23, 444-446, 529

Langue d'oc 320 n

Langue d’oc 320n

老子，中国圣贤，150

Lao-zi, Chinese sage 150

老挝 204、206、417

Laos 204, 206, 417

脚本 202

script 202

拉斯卡萨斯（参见德拉斯卡萨斯）

Las Casas see De Las Casas

拉丁文12, 20-22, 24 n , 48, 53, 75, 76-78, 86, 92, 101 n , 179, 520

Latin 12, 20-22, 24n, 48, 53, 75, 76-78, 86, 92, 101n, 179, 520

分为罗曼语族308-309

breaks up into Romance languages 308-309

以及英国人 301-304、517

and the Britons 301-304, 517

以及凯尔特语使用者295-301, 304

and Celtic-speakers 295-301, 304

分类 277 n

classification 277n

子语言（罗曼语族）329

daughter languages (Romance) 329

衰落/复兴/消亡 260-261, 307, 309, 314, 315-321, 325-330, 526

decline/revival/death 260-261, 307, 309, 314, 315-321, 325-330, 526

以及法语405-406

and French 405-406

语法学316-321、325、476

grammatica 316-321, 325, 476

希腊的影响（公元前250-254年，公元前298-299年）

Greek influence 250-254, 298-299

北非 100, 307 n

in North Africa 100, 307n

布匿语双语现象 307 n

Punic bilingualism 307n

扩散系数分别为 275、490、540

spread of 275, 490, 540

粗俗307

Vulgar 307

武加大圣经294

Vulgate bible 294

以及西方基督教 209

and Western Christianity 209

另见 罗曼语族

see also Romance languages

拉丁美洲参见美洲

Latin America see Americas

拉脱维亚 432-433、443、445

Latvia 432-433, 443, 445

亚瑟之死（马洛里）332

Le Morte d’Arthur (Malory) 332

Le Phénomène humain (夏尔丹) 403 n

Le Phénomène humain (Chardin) 403n

黎巴嫩 44、70-71、78、128

Lebanon 44, 70-71, 78, 128

新加坡总理李光耀 548

Lee Kwan Yew, prime minister of Singapore 548

莱布尼茨，戈特弗里德·冯男爵，德国哲学家，公元410年

Leibniz, Baron Gottfried von, German philosopher 410

勒纳佩483

Lenape 483

一般语言346, 356, 358, 360, 363-373, 375, 568 n 15

Lengua general346, 356, 358, 360, 363-373, 375, 568n15

莱昂99

León 99

莱昂托波利斯 151

Leontopolis 151

利奥波德，比利时国王，公元418年

Léopold, Belgian king 418

Lepontic 242, 284-285, 291

勒尔多法律 375

Lerdo Law 375

黎凡特公司 479

Levant Company 479

莱德克尔，梅尔基奥尔，《圣经》马来语译者 402

Leydekker, Melchior, translator of Bible into Malay 402

莱兹吉安41

Lezgian 41

梁武帝，中国皇帝 119

Liang Wudi, Chinese emperor 119

利比里亚 508、515

Liberia 508, 515

图书馆（苏美尔语/阿卡德语）34、49、54；（赫梯语）41；（布匿语）75；（梵语）221 ；（希腊语）248；（印度英语）499

Libraries (Sumerian/Akkadian) 34, 49, 54; (Hittite) 41; (Punic) 75; (Sanskrit) 221n; (Greek) 248; (English in India) 499

利比亚 78、97、119、120

Libya 78, 97, 119, 120

以及埃及 126-127、164

and Egypt 126-127, 164

利比亚126-129, 149

Libyan 126-129, 149

罗睺线，（迦梨陀娑）559

Line of Raghu, The (Kālidāsa) 559

Lingala 419 n

Lingala 419n

通用语

Lingua franca

术语 407 n的起源

origin of term 407n

扮演这一角色的各种语言

various languages which took this role

阿卡德语42、54、62、110、129

Akkadian 42, 54, 62, 110, 129

阿拉伯语209, 547

Arabic 209, 547

阿拉姆语34、35、79、80-82

Aramaic 34, 35, 79, 80-82

《大西洋凯尔特人》 290-292

’Atlantic Celtic’ 290-292

中文547

Chinese 547

英语24、457、458、503、510、513、532、545

English 24, 457, 458, 503, 510, 513, 532, 545

意大利语407 n

Italian 407n

法语412, 532

French 412, 532

希腊文20、86、164、190、299

Greek 20, 86, 164, 190, 299

拉丁文265, 325

Latin 265, 325

马来语380, 532

Malay 380, 532

纳瓦特尔语355

Nahuatl 355

巴利语215

Pali 215

波斯语101, 497

Persian 101, 497

腓尼基人546

Phoenician 546

葡萄牙语387-388、395、497、513

Portuguese 387-388, 395, 497, 513

俄语429、443、531

Russian 429, 443, 531

梵文179

Sanskrit 179

粟特语108, 546

Sogdian 108, 546

斯瓦希里语105、508、533

Swahili 105, 508, 533

突厥语531, 547

Turkic 531, 547

543、558 年有意识地确立了通用语。

deliberate establishment of lingua franca general 543, 558

阿卡德语，亚述19、44

Akkadian by Assyria 19, 44

波斯阿拉姆语 47, 548

Aramaic by Persia 47, 548

亚历山大48的希腊语

Greek by Alexander 48

克丘亚语，印加人，公元前357-360年

Quechua by Incas 357-360

西方列强杂项 381

miscellaneous by Western powers 381

新加坡英语548

English by Singapore 548

无意中建立的通用语

unintentional establishment of lingua franca

亚述的阿拉米语66（反例：562 n. 28）

Aramaic by Assyria 66 (contra: 562 n. 28)

阿拉伯人说的波斯语99

Persian by Arabs 99

角色丧失

loss of role

拉丁文328-330

Latin 328-330

保留角色

retention of role

纳瓦特尔语、克丘亚语367

Nahuatl, Quechua 367

瓜拉尼语376

Guarani 376

英语、葡萄牙语513

English, Portuguese 513

西方帝国语言 444-446

Western imperial languages 444-446

通识393-395

Lingua geral393-395

语言创新

Linguistic innovations

古代近东的许多地区 29-35

many in the Ancient Near East 29-35

楔形文字作为表意文字标准 61-63, 512

cuneiform as ideographic standard 61-63, 512

音节文字 156

syllabic writing 156

字母书写 45-46、63-68、202-203、241-242

alphabetic writing 45-46, 63-68, 202-203, 241-242

印刷版 326-328、346

printing 326-328, 346

电子通讯 511-513

electronic communications 511-513

语言学

Linguistics

第 156-157、180-182、209-212、220、224、238页的起源

origins of 156-157, 180-182, 209-212, 220, 224, 238n

古代语言的重构 31

reconstruction of past languages 31

傈僳族134

Lisu 134

识字能力

Literacy

为语言历史提供证据 24

providing evidence for language history 24

被认为是语言传播的一个因素 63-64

as supposed factor in language spread 63-64

高卢语284-288

Gaulish 284-288

罗马帝国晚期 308 年

in late Roman Empire 308

通过梵语传播202

spread through Sanskrit 202

苏联时期传播 441-442

spread under Soviets 441-442

其价值受到质疑 57, 182-183

its value doubted 57, 182-183

立陶宛 24 n , 424-425, 431, 432

Lithuania 24n, 424-425, 431, 432

刘叶见索玛

Liuye see Soma

利维乌斯·安德洛尼库斯，拉丁诗人 251, 299

Livius Andronicus, Latin poet 251, 299

利沃尼亚 432

Livonia 432

李维，罗马历史学家，公元前285年

Livy, Roman historian 285

《阿纳瓦克的李维》344

’Livy of Anáhuac’ 344

表意符号（参见文字）

Logograms see writing

伦巴第 306、307、309

Lombards 306, 307, 309

罗蒙诺索夫，米哈伊尔，俄罗斯学者 439

Lomonósov, Mikhail, Russian scholar 439

洛佩斯·德·圣安娜，安东尼奥 494

López de Santa Anna, Antonio 494

洛普里诺，安东尼奥 113 n

Loprieno, Antonio 113n

Lorenzana y Buitron, Antonio de，墨西哥大主教 373-374, 539

Lorenzana y Buitrón, Antonio de, Archbishop of Mexico 373-374, 539

路易十三，法国国王，公元409年

Louis XIII, French king 409

路易十四，法国国王，公元409年、414年

Louis XIV, French king 409, 414

低地德语312

Low German 312

Lud 35 n

Lud 35n

Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi 30

德国人路德维希，公元317-318年国王

Ludwig the German, king 317-318

卢卢比 43

Lulubi 43

洛阳151

Luoyang 151

卢西塔尼亚288 n

Lusitanian 288n

卢索芬 390

Lusophone 390

路德，马丁，德国宗教改革家，326、447、472-473

Luther, Martin, German reformer 326, 447, 472-473

卢维安39、41、44、50、62、71、84

Luwian 39, 41, 44, 50, 62, 71, 84

吕宋岛 148

Luzon 148

吕西亚语83-84, 86

Lycian 83-84, 86

莉迪亚 46、47、83

Lydia 46, 47, 83

吕底亚12, 30, 35 n , 41, 4748, 83-84, 86, 249

Lydian 12, 30, 35n, 41, 4748, 83-84, 86, 249

并购（M&A）19、24

M&A (Merger & Acquisition) 19, 24

马欢，中国海员 147

Ma Huan, Chinese mariner 147

麦考利，托马斯·巴宾顿，英国评论家 22 n , 496, 503 n , 516 n

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, British pundit 22n, 496, 503n, 516n

马其顿 98、269、293

Macedonia 98, 269, 293

马其顿语85、131、290

Macedonian 85, 131, 290

麦金农，D.牧师，英国教师 500

MacKinnon, Revd D., British teacher 500

麦克米伦，哈罗德，英国首相 541

Macmillan, Harold, British prime minister 541

马达加斯加 101、105、412、418-419

Madagascar 101, 105, 412, 418-419

詹姆斯·麦迪逊，美国总统（第488任）

Madison, James, US President 488

摩揭陀177, 178, 187-190, 192, 197, 218

Magadhi 177, 178, 187-190, 192, 197, 218

马格里布 100

Maghreb 100

马格里布78 n

Maghrebi 78n

Magyars 306, 309, 425

《摩诃婆罗多》 176, 184, 195, 197, 204, 206-207

Mahābhārata 176, 184, 195, 197, 204, 206-207

Mahābhā⋅ya（Pataõjali）180

Mahābhā⋅ya (Pataõjali) 180

马哈拉施特拉邦 188-189

Maharashtra 188-189

马宗达，RC，印度学者 206

Majumdar, R.C., Indian scholar 206

马来语 97 n , 208, 380, 400-403, 444, 446, 457, 476, 498, 532, 539

Malay 97n, 208, 380, 400-403, 444, 446, 457, 476, 498, 532, 539

马来亚 204 n , 205, 213, 505, 507, 536

Malaya 204n, 205, 213, 505, 507, 536

马拉雅拉姆语198, 528

Malayalam 198, 528

马来西亚, 147号, 149, 161, 199, 201, 385, 387, 390, 398, 400, 506号, 544

Malaysia, 147n, 149, 161, 199, 201, 385, 387, 390, 398, 400, 506n, 544

马尔科姆三世，苏格兰国王，公元463年

Malcolm III, Scottish king 463

Malin-tzin，墨西哥翻译 342, 355

Malin-tzin, Mexican interpreter 342, 355

马洛里，托马斯爵士，英国作家，332

Malory, Sir Thomas, English writer 332

马耳他 71, 97

Malta 71, 97

mamelucos 371

埃及马穆鲁克王朝 121

Mameluke dynasty of Egypt 121

满洲 171, 308 n

Manchu 171, 308n

170-171人，308人

people 170-171, 308n

满洲 21、121、138、143-146、148、380、427

Manchuria 21, 121, 138, 143-146, 148, 380, 427

曼科·卡帕克，印加357

Manco Capac, Inca 357

曼达安/曼达克90 n

Mandaean/Mandaic 90n

普通话 参见中文

Mandarin see Chinese

马纳托，埃及历史学家，公元165年

Manātho, Egyptian historian 165n

摩尼教141

Manichaeans 141

弗雷·胡安·德·曼西拉 (Mansilla)，西班牙修道士 364

Mansilla, Fray Juan de, Spanish friar 364

《摩奴法典》第186-187、194条

Manu Law Code 186-187, 194

毛利语506

Māori 506

马普切语 349, 363

Mapuche 349, 363

马普切语349、361、363

Mapudungun 349, 361, 363

马拉地语188、528、530

Marathi 188, 528, 530

Mari 37、39、41、53、60-61

Mari 37, 39, 41, 53, 60-61

马凯特·佩尔 (Marquette Père)，法国探险家 412

Marquette Père, French explorer 412

马提亚尔，拉丁诗人，公元523年

Martial, Latin poet 523

马提尼克 415

Martinique 415

马克思，卡尔，德国圣贤 438 n

Marx, Karl, German sage 438n

马萨诸塞州483、484-485

Massachusett 483, 484-485

Massaesylia 75

Massylia 75

毛里塔尼亚 98

Mauritania 98

马克斯·哈维拉尔（穆尔塔图利）395

Max Havelaar (Multatuli) 395

玛雅语1-4、11 n、348、352、364 n、372

Maya 1-4, 11n, 348, 352, 364n, 372

麦加94

Mecca 94

梅克尔少校，战略顾问 451

Meckel, Major, strategic consultant 451

梅达沃，彼得，英国生物学家 403 n

Medawar, Peter, British biologist 403n

Medes 43、47、56、79、87

Medes 43, 47, 56, 79, 87

中位数131

Median 131

麦地那94

Medina 94

梅杰伊131 n

Medjay 131n

麦加斯梯尼，塞琉古大使，公元191-192年、247年

Megasthenes, Seleucid ambassador 191-192, 247

穆罕默德，奥斯曼苏丹 266年

Mehmet, Ottoman Sultan 266n

美拉尼西亚人 22

Melanesians 22

孟菲斯 127、151

Memphis 127, 151

孟菲斯神学113-114

Memphite theology 113-114

米南德，希腊剧作家，公元234年

Menander, Greek dramatist 234

米南德，希腊国王 192、219、230、246

Menander, Greek king 192, 219, 230, 246

以弗所的米南德，希腊历史学家，公元71年

Menander of Ephesus, Greek historian 71

孟子，中国圣贤（亦称孟子）137 n，152

Mencius, Chinese sage (also Meng-zi) 137n, 152

门德斯·平托 (Fernāo)，葡萄牙探险家 388-389

Mendes Pinto, Fernāo, Portuguese explorer 388-389

梅嫩德斯·皮达尔，R.307

Menéndez Pidal, R.307

美尼斯，法老 124、151 年

Menes, pharaoh 124, 151

商人眼中的贸易，自由企业

Merchants see Trade, Free enterprise

梅里卡雷，法老 122、154

Merikare, pharaoh 122, 154

麦伦普塔，法老126

Merneptah, pharaoh 126

麦罗埃特语128

Meroitic 128

美索不达米亚 21, 38, 41, 42-45, 47-50, 53, 55, 56, 60-61, 65, 79-80, 83, 86, 154, 164, 209, 247, 257-258, 536

Mesopotamia 21, 38, 41, 42-45, 47-50, 53, 55, 56, 60-61, 65, 79-80, 83, 86, 154, 164, 209, 247, 257-258, 536

梅斯罗普·马什托茨，亚美尼亚主教，88

Mesrop Mashtotz, Armenian Bishop 88

梅萨皮安242

Messapian 242

Mestizo 17, 338, 342-345, 347, 367, 372-376

另见跨种族家庭

see also Interracial families

墨西加 346号、351 号、367 号、375 号、377 号

Mexica 346n, 351, 367, 375, 377

Mexicana，lengua，参见 纳瓦特尔语

Mexicana, lengua, see Nahuatl

墨西哥 308、364、366、444、488、531

Mexico 308, 364, 366, 444, 488, 531

十六世纪语言 352

sixteenth-century languages 352

必修西班牙语374

compulsory Spanish 374

土著语言 375-376

indigenous languages 375-376

lenguas 生成367

lenguas generates 367

墨西哥割让地 487、494-495

Mexican cession 487, 494-495

1559年人口为568人，n= 14

population in 1559 568n14

印刷机 346

printing presses 346

印度共和国 368

republic of Indians 368

西班牙占领时期：1-4、12、14-17、337、340、342、346、349、392、494-495年

Spanish occupation 1-4, 12, 14-17, 337, 340, 342, 346, 349, 392, 494-495

美国经济379

and US economy 379

密克罗尼西亚 448、452-454、510、573 n 70

Micronesia 448, 452-454, 510, 573n70

中东 21、43、45、110-112、377

Middle East 21, 43, 45, 110-112, 377

语言创新 29-35, 37

linguistic innovations 29-35, 37

中古英语66 n , 125

Middle English 66n, 125

米德拉什70 n

Midrash 70n

134号

Mien 134

Milinda 192、230、246

Milinda 192, 230, 246

Milinda-paõha , 国王米琳达问题 192, 246

Milinda-paõha, Questions of King Milinda 192, 246

詹姆斯·密尔，英国哲学家 501, 513

Mill, James, English philosopher 501, 513

明朝 121、143、144、147、148、160 年

Ming dynasty 121, 143, 144, 147, 148, 160

《密释纳》 70 n

Mishnah 70n

传教士们看到了基督教

Missionaries see Christianity

米坦尼41、62、128、196

Mitanni 41, 62, 128, 196

米切尔，玛格丽特 490

Mitchell, Margaret 490

米特拉达塔 1257

Mithradata 1257

密特拉 255

Mithras 255

米斯特克346、352、355

Mixtec 346, 352, 355

摩押人70, 71

Moabite 70, 71

莫西亚310

Moesia 310

摩尔多瓦 443

Moldova 443

让·巴蒂斯特·莫里哀，法国剧作家 410

Molière, Jean-Baptiste, French dramatist 410

弗雷·阿隆索·莫利纳，西班牙修道士 346

Molina, Fray Alonso de, Spanish friar 346

莫奈姆瓦夏，262年编年史

Monemvasia, Chronicle of 262

蒙古 21、121、143、427

Mongolia 21, 121, 143, 427

人口 153、170-171、207、425-426、555；宗教 179

people 153, 170-171, 207, 425-426, 555 religion 179

蒙古语106、108、138、140、143、145、146、156-157、217

Mongolian 106, 108, 138, 140, 143, 145, 146, 156-157, 217

单性论 89

Monophysites 89

门罗，詹姆斯，美国总统 488

Monroe, James, US President 488

蒙卡尔姆侯爵，法国将军 415

Montcalm, Marquess of, French general 415

蒙特卡西诺修道院 319

Montecassino monastery 319

蒙特祖玛（参见蒙特祖玛）

Montezuma see Motecuhzoma

亨利·摩根，英国海盗，480

Morgan, Henry, British pirate 480

莫斯科 426-427，431-432

Moscow 426-427, 431-432

莫塞，费尔南 472 n

Mossé, Fernand 472n

Motecuhzoma，阿兹特克 tlatoani 1-4, 14-16, 353 n

Motecuhzoma, Aztec tlatoani 1-4, 14-16, 353n

Motolinía (弗雷·托里比奥·德·贝纳文特), 西班牙修士 368, 371

Motolinía (Fray Toribio de Benavente), Spanish Friar 368, 371

莫桑比克 104-105、387、390、399

Mozambique 104-105, 387, 390, 399

Mufwene, Salikoko，历史语言学家 559 n

Mufwene, Salikoko, historical linguist 559n

莫卧儿王朝 106、108、212、223、497 年（注：原文有误，应为 497 年，但原文有误，应为 514 年）

Mughal dynasty 106, 108, 212, 223, 497n, 514

穆罕默德，阿拉伯先知 93-94, 96, 103, 260

Muhammad, Arab prophet 93-94, 96, 103, 260

穆伦贝格，FAC 492

Mühlenberg, F.A.C. 492

穆伊斯卡/穆伊斯卡 参见 奇布查

Muisca/Muysca see Chibcha

Multatuli（Eduard Douwes Dekker），荷兰小说家 395

Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker), Dutch novelist 395

蒙达语系177、188、197、217

Munda languages 177, 188, 197, 217

穆尔西里斯，55世纪国王

Mursilis, king 55

穆什基 43

Muški 43

穆斯林 88 n , 92, 94-96, 141, 164, 212, 434

Muslims 88n, 92, 94-96, 141, 164, 212, 434

另见伊斯兰教

see also Islam

Musophilus（Daniel）323

Musophilus (Daniel) 323

Musti，D. 249

Musti, D. 249

Myiares，Andreas 265

Myiares, Andreas 265

米西亚人 43

Mysians 43

纳巴达 37

Nabada 37

纳瓦特尔语1-4, 14-17, 342, 344, 346, 350-355, 363, 368-369, 372, 374, 444, 521 n

Nahuatl 1-4, 14-17, 342, 344, 346, 350-355, 363, 368-369, 372, 374, 444, 521n

与西班牙14-15世纪的风格形成对比

style contrasted with Spanish 14-15

Nālandā Mahāvihara，佛教大学 193, 194, 220-222

Nālandā Mahāvihāra, Buddhist university 193, 194, 220-222

南粤146

Nan-yue 146

南京151

Nanjing 151

纳帕塔 127

Napata 127

拿破仑三世，法国皇帝，公元301年、416年

Napoleon III, French emperor 301, 416n

博物学(普林尼) 27, 336

Naturalis Historia (Pliny) 27, 336

瑙克拉提斯 130, 240 n

Naucratis 130, 240n

纳瓦霍族人口普查 489-490

Navajo census 489-490

纳瓦拉99

Navarre 99

Nawat 350 n

Nawat 350n

近东 76、90、92、111

Near East 76, 90, 92, 111

尼阿库斯，希腊海军上将，公元191-192年

Nearchus, Greek admiral 191-192

内布里哈，安东尼奥·德，西班牙语言学家 331、345、348、380、396、446、472

Nebrija, Antonio de, Spanish linguist 331, 345, 348, 380, 396, 446, 472

尼布甲尼撒二世，巴比伦国王，公元44、47、59、79年

Nebuchadrezzar II, Babylonian king 44, 47, 59, 79

内尼厄斯，《不列颠编年史》311年

Nennius, chronicler of Britain 311

尼泊尔语176

Nepali 176

Nesian 41 n

Nesian 41n

景教 88-90, 119, 120, 141, 158, 536

Nestorians 88-90, 119, 120, 141, 158, 536

荷兰 398、400 n、409

Netherlands 398, 400n, 409

新格拉纳达 339、367、568 n 15

New Granada 339, 367, 568n15

新赫布里底群岛（参见瓦努阿图）

New Hebrides see Vanuatu

新世界，见美洲。

New World see Americas

新西兰 506、508、510、535

New Zealand 506, 508, 510, 535

牛顿，艾萨克爵士 328

Newton, Sir Isaac 328

Nhengatu 见 Tupinambá

Nhengatu see Tupinambá

尼基弗鲁斯一世，拜占庭皇帝 262

Nicephorus I, Byzantine emperor 262

新荷兰 492-493

Nieuw Nederland 492-493

尼日利亚 508, 530

Nigeria 508, 530

尼古拉二世，沙皇433年

Nikolay II, Tsar 433

尼姆罗德 35 n

Nimrod 35n

尼姆鲁德也卡尔胡88

Nimrud also Kalhu 88

尼尼微 49-50、54、65

Nineveh 49-50, 54, 65

尼普尔 58

Nippur 58

尼萨德，法兰克编年史家 317

Nithard, Frankish chronicler 317

诺曼法语（ 参见法语条目）

Norman French see under French

Normans 275, 319, 406, 447 n , 458-460, 461-465

Normans 275, 319, 406, 447n, 458-460, 461-465

Norse 312, 314 n , 447 n , 460

Norse 312, 314n, 447n, 460

北欧人视维京人

Norsemen see Vikings

北非 37、45、46、49、70-71、76、78、93、122、292、536

North Africa 37, 45, 46, 49, 70-71, 76, 78, 93, 122, 292, 536

阿拉伯语入门100

Arabic in 100

418-419 年的法语

French language in 418-419

葡萄牙语382

Portuguese 382

伊斯兰教的传播 100-101, 209

spread of Islam 100-101, 209

北美

North America

十七世纪欧洲殖民地 482

Seventeenth-century European colonies 482

美国革命 486-487

American Revolution 486-487

以及英语19、241、378、457、480、485、486-492、504-505、518、535

and English 19, 241, 378, 457, 480 485, 486-492, 504-505, 518, 535

欧洲人口 415

European population 415

以及法语411-413、415、457

and French 411-413, 415, 457

移民 487, 491-492

immigration 487, 491-492

新法国 412-414, 486, 492-494

Nouvelle-France 412-414, 486, 492-494

以及西班牙 378、494-495

and Spain 378, 494-495

北美评论474 n

North American Review 474n

北卡罗来纳州 80

North Carolina 80

新法国 412-414, 486, 492-494

Nouvelle-France 412-414, 486, 492-494

新斯科舍省 414

Nova Scotia 414

努比亚 127-128, 129

Nubia 127-128, 129

数字37、37n 、38、50n

numerals 37, 37n, 38, 50n

努米底亚78

Numidia 78

努子62

Nuzi 62

新瑞典 492

Ny Sverige 492

亚历山大^·涅夫斯基 (Nyevskiy)，俄罗斯王子 426、447

N^yevskiy, Aleksandr, Russian prince 426, 447

奥克西坦语300

Occitan 300

奥德赛44 n , 236, 251

Odyssey 44n, 236, 251

古诺尔斯语e参见 Norse

Old Norse see Norse

奥尔莫斯，安德烈斯神父，346

Olmos, Father Andres de 346

Omotic 36

奥内西克里图斯，希腊海军上将，公元191年

Onesicritus, Greek admiral 191

奥利金，《教会教父》256

Origen, Church father 256

奥里亚语198

Oriya 198

《卢济塔尼亚人传》（卡蒙斯）382

Os Lusíadas (Camões) 382

奥斯坎17, 242, 278-280, 291 n , 299

Oscan 17, 242, 278-280, 291n, 299

骨科48, 108

Ossetic 48, 108

东哥特人 261、306、307

Ostrogoths 261, 306, 307

奥托米352, 355

Otomí 352, 355

奥斯曼王朝 106、121、264、266、411、434-435 年

Ottoman dynasty 106, 121, 264, 266, 411, 434-435

海洋海岸总体调查（马环）147

Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores (Ma Huan) 147

《牛津英语诗歌集》 474 n

Oxford Book of English Verse 474n

帕查库特克，印加357

Pachacutec, Inca 357

帕科米乌斯（圣人），教会教父，133

Pachomius (Saint), Church father 133

太平洋 340、417、419、448、452、454、508、513

Pacific 340, 417, 419, 448, 452, 454, 508, 513

巴列维48, 98

Pahlavi 48, 98

巴基斯坦 85,530

Pakistan 85, 530

帕莱克39，41

Palaic 39, 41

巴勒斯坦 42、44、48、62、79、86、111、128-129、209、247-248、259

Palestine 42, 44, 48, 62, 79, 86, 111, 128-129, 209, 247-248, 259

巴利语 145 n、 151、 159、 162、 178、 190、 192、 202、 208、 214、 215-216、 536

Pali 145n, 151, 159, 162, 178, 190, 192, 202, 208, 214, 215-216, 536

Paõcatantra 199, 208

帕尼尼 (Pānini)，梵语语法学家 181, 183, 185, 217, 218

Pānini, Sanskrit grammarian 181, 183, 185, 217, 218

巴布亚新几内亚 10、12、508

Papua New Guinea 10, 12, 508

巴拉圭 367-368、371、373 页脚注、376页

Paraguay 367-368, 371, 373n, 376

Paraš，实时翻译技术 82

Paraš, technique of real-time translation 82

巴黎 407-408

Paris 407-408

第56-57段

Parsa 56-57

帕提亚人108、131、247、257-259

Parthian 108, 131, 247, 257-259

帕提亚书 35、48、86、87、98、245、246-247、269

Parthians 35, 48, 86, 87, 98, 245, 246-247, 269

帕提亚驿站，（伊西多鲁斯）258

Parthian Stations, The (Isidorus) 258

普什图语，108，186

Pashto, 108, 186

巴塔哥尼亚93

Patagonia 93

Pataõjali.梵文语法 180, 185-186, 245

Pataõjali.Sanskritgrammarian 180, 185-186, 245

圣帕特里克，教会圣人，303

Patrick (Saint), Church father 303

佩切涅格人 425

Pechenegs 425

伯罗奔尼撒战争82

Peloponnesian War 82

槟城 149, 506

Penang 149, 506

宾夕法尼亚荷兰语92

Pennsylvania Dutch 92

伯里克利，希腊政治家 233

Pericles, Greek statesman 233

Períplous Thalássēs Eruthraías 102-104

波斯波利斯 57, 259

Persepolis 57, 259

波斯 47、57、81-82、86、120、122、129

Persia 47, 57, 81-82, 86, 120, 122, 129

阿拉伯语双语现象 98-100, 163

Arabic bilingualism 98-100, 163

以及埃及 130-131、164-165

and Egypt 130-131, 164-165

希腊的统治 245、247、257

Greek overlordship 245, 247, 257

政治挫折 108

political setbacks 108

以及俄罗斯 434

and Russia 434

波斯语12, 21, 30, 43, 47-48, 57, 97, 101, 106, 108, 132, 141, 160, 212-213, 219, 246, 300 n , 514, 554

Persian 12, 21, 30, 43, 47-48, 57, 97, 101, 106, 108, 132, 141, 160, 212-213, 219, 246, 300n, 514, 554

秘鲁 12、308、334、338、339、342、344、346、356-358、364、367-370、372、392、519

Peru 12, 308, 334, 338, 339, 342, 344, 346, 356-358, 364, 367-370, 372, 392, 519

彼得大帝，又称彼得一世，沙皇，公元432年、438-439年

Peter the Great also Petr I, Tsar 432, 438-439

'Phagspa，字母表 156-157，212 n

’Phagspa, alphabet 156-157, 212n

菲莱132

Philae 132

菲利普二世（参见费利佩二世）

Philip II see Felipe II

马其顿的腓力八十五年

Philip of Macedon 85

菲律宾 147 n , 148, 161, 340, 374, 377-379, 400, 444, 509, 515, 544

Philippines 147n, 148, 161, 340, 374, 377-379, 400, 444, 509, 515, 544

比布鲁斯的斐洛 72-73

Philo of Byblos 72-73

菲洛斯特拉图斯，雅典智者 565 n 28

Philostratus, Athenian sophist 565n28

腓尼基 69-70, 83

Phoenicia 69-70, 83

神 72-73

gods 72-73

人口 4445、111、242 n、292

people 4445, 111, 242n, 292

239号定居点

settlements 239

腓尼基语11 n , 21, 30, 34, 44-45, 60 n , 68-78, 70, 73, 90, 103, 112, 250, 267, 520 n , 536, 546

Phoenician 11n, 21, 30, 34, 44-45, 60n, 68-78, 70, 73, 90, 103, 112, 250, 267, 520n, 536, 546

字母表 44-6、72 n、155、210 n

alphabet 44-6, 72n, 155, 210n

语法 68 n

grammar 68n

另见布匿

see also Punic

语音学 37、50、54、154、156-157、209-212

Phonetics 37, 50, 54, 154, 156-157, 209-212

弗里吉亚语43、48、83、249

Phrygian 43, 48, 83, 249

Phrynichus Arabius，希腊学究 254

Phrynichus Arabius, Greek pedant 254

象形图参见文字

Pictograms see writing

皮钦语 10、380、390、497、508、575和63

Pidgins 10, 380, 390, 497, 508, 575n63

皮加费塔，安东尼奥，西班牙探险家 401 n

Pigafetta, Antonio, Spanish explorer 401n

菲律宾语 参见 他加禄语

Pilipino see Tagalog

品达，希腊诗人，公元前230年

Pindar, Greek poet 230

Pinteado，安东尼奥，葡萄牙探险家 388

Pinteado, Antonio, Portuguese explorer 388

拼音见中文

Pinyin see Chinese

盗版 102、129、148、158、199、201、382、391、415-416、421、478-479、491、494、519

Piracy 102, 129, 148, 158, 199, 201, 382, 391, 415-416, 421, 478-479, 491, 494, 519

西班牙征服者弗朗西斯科·皮萨罗 338, 339, 343, 356

Pizarro, Francisco, Spanish conquistador 338, 339, 343, 356

普劳图斯，罗马剧作家，《公元前76-77年》、《公元前252年》、《公元前565年》注25

Plautus, Roman dramatist 76-77, 252, 565n25

老普林尼，罗马海军上将和百科全书编纂者，27, 191, 336

Pliny the Elder, Roman admiral and encyclopaedist 27, 191, 336

普鲁塔克，希腊传记作家，5, 131 n , 258, 259 n , 555

Plutarch, Greek biographer 5, 131n, 258, 259n, 555

波卡洪塔斯，波瓦坦公主 481

Pocahontas, Powhatan princess 481

《熙德诗篇》332n

Poema de Mio Cid 332n

Poenulus (Plautus) 76-77, 78 n

Poenulus (Plautus) 76-77, 78n

波兰 410、429、431-432

Poland 410, 429, 431-432

波利埃，安托万-路易·亨利，英国东印度公司的法国人，497，575 n 41

Polier, Antoine-Louis Henri, Frenchman in British East India Company 497, 575n41

波尔克，詹姆斯·诺克斯，美国总统 488, 494

Polk, James Knox, US President 488, 494

Polo，Marco 336 n

Polo, Marco 336n

波利比乌斯，希腊历史学家，252、279、293、294、295

Polybius, Greek historian 252, 279, 293, 294, 295

多纪元(Higden) 467, 468, 471

Polychronicon (Higden) 467, 468, 471

波利尼西亚 9, 23 n

Polynesia 9, 23n

人口

Population

密度 152-153、373、376、412、412 n、415、494

density 152-153, 373, 376, 412, 412n, 415, 494

生长 414-415、489、490-495、527-528、530-1、535、545、547、557、572 n 42、577 n 9

growth 414-415, 489, 490-495, 527-528, 530-1, 535, 545, 547, 557, 572n42, 577n9

流动（另见“驱逐出境”）18-19、22、24、64-66、126、141、146、163-167、239-241、273-275、293-294、325、332、339 n 、343-344、360、376、378-379、391-392、394、411、423、433、435、437、486-487、491-492、492 n、495、506、531、534-537、538 n

movement (see also Deportation) 18-19, 22, 24, 64-66, 126, 141, 146, 163-167, 239-241, 273-275, 293-294, 325, 332, 339n, 343-344, 360, 376, 378-379, 391-392, 394, 411, 423, 433, 435, 437, 486-487, 491-492, 492n, 495, 506, 531, 534-537, 538n

葡萄牙

Portugal

亚洲帝国 385-390年、396-398年、519年

Asian empire 385-390, 396-398, 519

以及中国148

and China 148

海上探险 334-336、382、478

maritime explorations 334-336, 382, 478

穆斯林人口：99,384

Muslim presence 99, 384

贸易帝国 385, 386-391

trading empire 385, 386-391

另见巴西

see also Brazil

葡萄牙语300、325 n、331、332 n、380、382、384、385、387-388、390-395、404 n、446、476、497-498、499 n、513、525-533、536

Portuguese 300, 325n, 331, 332n, 380, 382, 384, 385, 387-388, 390-395, 404n, 446, 476, 497-498, 499n, 513, 525-533, 536

在美国 391-395

in America 391-395

以及基督教 387-390、398 页脚注、401 页

and Christianity 387-390, 398n, 401

巴西扩张 393

expansion in Brazil 393

波西迪普斯，希腊剧作家，公元前230年

Posidippus, Greek dramatist 230

波西多尼乌斯，希腊学者 276, 277

Posidonius, Greek scholar 276, 277

普拉克利特语 参见梵语

Prakrit see Sanskrit

《自然哲学的数学原理》（牛顿）328

Principia (Newton) 328

Prinsep, James，英国学者 503 n

Prinsep, James, British scholar 503n

普罗科皮乌斯，拜占庭历史学家 261-262, 311 n

Procopius, Byzantine historian 261-262, 311n

普罗旺斯语320 n

Provençal 320n

阿尼卡尔箴言38, 83

Proverbs of Aniqar 38, 83

普鲁士 448

Prussia 448

普萨姆泰克一世，法老129

Psamtek I, pharaoh 129

普萨美提克三世，法老131

Psamtek III, pharaoh 131

Ptah 113-114, 132

托勒密王朝 86, 131, 248-249, 251, 259, 276, 281

Ptolemaic dynasty 86, 131, 248-249, 251, 259, 276, 281

布匿语46, 75-78, 97, 100, 250, 307 n , 536另见 腓尼基语

Punic 46, 75-78, 97, 100, 250, 307n, 536 see also Phoenician

普奎纳356-357

Puquina 356-357

普通话 参见中文

Putonghuà see Chinese

皮洛士，希腊国王，公元前251年

Pyrrhus, Greek king 251

卡特纳 41

Qatna 41

秦朝118年、137-138年、140年

Qín dynasty 118, 137-138, 140

清朝121、144、148、149年

Qīng dynasty 121, 144, 148, 149

盖丘亚语21、342、344-346、355-360、363、369、372-373、444、519、521n 、557

Quechua 21, 342, 344-346, 355-360, 363, 369, 372-373, 444, 519, 521n, 557

昆士兰州 80

Queensland 80

奎勒-库奇，阿瑟爵士 474 n

Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur 474n

库姆98

Qum 98

国语（越南语罗马化拼写）414 n

Quôc-ngu (’National Language’, Vietnamese romanized script) 414n

古兰经94、97、98、216、521

Qur’ān 94, 97n, 98, 216, 521

Quti/Qutium 40, 43

拉辛，让，法国剧作家 410

Racine, Jean, French dramatist 410

莱佛士，斯坦福，英国开发商 399、402、506

Raffles, Stamford, British developer 399, 402, 506

Rājaśekhara，梵文诗人 189

Rājaśekhara, Sanskrit poet 189

拉贾辛哈二世，锡兰皇帝，公元388年

Rajasinha II, Ceylonese emperor 388

沃尔特·雷利爵士，英国冒险家，477年，479 年

Ralegh, Sir Walter, English adventurer 477n, 479

罗摩衍那(Valmīki) 176, 184, 198

Rāmāyana (Valmīki) 176, 184, 198

拉美西斯二世，法老126年

Ramses II, pharaoh 126

拉美西斯三世，法老127

Ramses III, pharaoh 127

Reclus, Onésime 404 n

Reclus, Onésime 404n

收复失地运动（基督教对西班牙的收复）99

Reconquista (Christian reconquest of Spain) 99

宗教改革 367、407、409、412、447、517

Reformation 367, 407, 409, 412, 447, 517

宗教 21-22、24、25、86-93、94-96、126

Religion 21-22, 24, 25, 86-93, 94-96, 126

文艺复兴 265、409、544

Renaissance 265, 409, 544

罗德斯，亚历山大·德，法国传教士，公元413年、414年

Rhodes, Alexandre de, French missionary 413, 414n

“富人交易” 397

’Rich trades’ 397

理查二世，英国国王，公元468年

Richard II, English king 468

理查二世（莎士比亚）477

Richard II (Shakespeare) 477

黎塞留，红衣主教，法国政治家 409, 410, 412

Richelieu, Cardinal, French statesman 409, 410, 412

里瓦罗尔，安托万·德，法国作家，410 n

Rivarol, Antoine de, French writer 410n

罗阿诺克，英国殖民地，公元477年、487年

Roanoke, English colony 477, 487

罗德里克，西哥特国王，公元99年

Roderik, Visigothic king 99

罗尔夫，约翰，英国烟草企业家 481

Rolfe, John, British tobacco entrepreneur 481

罗曼·德·鲁（瓦斯）458-459

Roman de Rou (Wace) 458-459

罗马帝国 20, 76, 96, 101 n , 111, 121, 140, 150, 164-167, 245

Roman empire 20, 76, 96, 101n, 111, 121, 140, 150, 164-167, 245

字母表 242

alphabet 242

边界（liabar;mes） 277, 297

boundary (liabar;mes) 277, 297

西305号的坍塌

collapse in the West 305

征服 275

conquests 275

扩展 251、293

expansion 251, 293

第四次十字军东征 263, 270

Fourth Crusade 263, 270

以及希腊文250-254、255、269

and Greek 250-254, 255, 269

移民 275

immigration 275

另见 拉丁语

see also Latin

罗马共和国公元278-279年、297年

Roman republic 278-279, 297

罗曼语族20, 98, 99, 175, 304, 307, 310, 314, 317-321, 325, 382, 405, 407, 460, 519, 526罗马尼亚语291 n , 309

Romance languages 20, 98, 99, 175, 304, 307, 310, 314, 317-321, 325, 382, 405, 407, 460, 519, 526 Romanian 291n, 309

罗曼诺夫王朝 431

Romanov dynasty 431

浪漫主义运动 266, 448

Romantic movement 266, 448

罗马书 45、48、71、295-299

Romans 45, 48, 71, 295-299

罗马

Rome

向西扩张 296

expansion westward 296

以及希腊语298

and Greek 298

以及拉丁文298、300

and Latin 298, 300

一袋293

sack of 293

罗森布拉特，天使373

Rosenblat, Angel 373

Rosetta Stone 165 n

Rosetta Stone 165n

鲁，乔治，法国亚述学家 63

Roux, Georges, French assyrologist 63

罗伊，拉姆·莫汉，印度知识分子 502，510

Roy, Ram Mohan, Indian intellectual 502, 510

皇家亚洲学会 185

Royal Asiatic Society 185

拉什迪，萨尔曼，印度英语作家 577 n 7

Rushdie, Salman, Indian writer in English 577n7

俄罗斯 106

Russia 106

以及中国427

and China 427

扩张

expansion

哥萨克入侵（427-428年）

Cossack invasions 427-428

东和西 427-432

east and west 427-432

移民 423、433、435

immigration 423, 433, 435

韩国人口 423 n

Korean population 423n

莫斯科公国 428, 430

of Muscovy 428, 430

俄罗斯（续）

Russia (cont.)

南北方向 432-437

north and south 432-437

起源 422 n , 423-427

origins 422n, 423-427

以及法国文化 410-411

and French culture 410-411

圣主教公会第435号法令

Holy Synod Act 435

以及日本 433、452

and Japan 433, 452

“文学语言” 442

’literary languages’ 442

穆斯林人口 434-435, 439

Muslim populations 434-435, 439

俄罗斯24 n , 108, 421 n , 422, 431, 433, 520, 528-529, 531

Russian 24n, 108, 421n, 422, 431, 433, 520, 528-529, 531

军队的语言统一性 438-439

army’s linguistic unity 438-439

双语能力 440

bilingualism 440

殖民语言 325 n , 427, 434, 437, 446

colonizing language 325n, 427, 434, 437, 446

西里尔字母 442

Cyrillic alphabet 442

意识形态语言 444

ideological language 444

文献439-440

literature 439-440

大众识字 441-442

mass literacy 441-442

传教士 429

missionaries 429

正字法 442

orthography 442

前景黯淡 444-446

poor prospects 444-446

苏联政策 441-444

Soviet policy 441-444

状态 437-441

status 437-441

苏联 441-444

Soviet Union 441-444

俄罗斯科学院 439

Russian Academy 439

俄罗斯圣经公会，帝国438

Russian Bible Society, Imperial 438

俄罗斯东正教教会 423、425、434、437-438

Russian Orthodox Church 423, 425, 434, 437-438

日俄战争 452

Russo-Japanese War 452

卢旺达 105

Rwanda 105

沙巴 505

Sabah 505

萨达姆·侯赛因，伊拉克独裁者，35岁

Saddam Hussein, Iraqi dictator 35

Sahagún, Fray Bernardo de，西班牙修道士 368

Sahagún, Fray Bernardo de, Spanish friar 368

科普特语萨希德方言92

Sahidic dialect of Coptic 92

圣托马斯基督徒 88

St Thomas Christians 88

Sais 130、151、165

Sais 130, 151, 165

šaka 43, 48

šaka 纪年系统 219 n

šaka era dating system 219n

šaka-Khotanese 108

销售，柯克帕特里克 335 n，336 n

Sale, Kirkpatrick 335n, 336n

撒玛利亚 56, 65

Samaria 56, 65

撒玛利亚基督徒 87

Samaritan Christians 87

撒马尔罕 21、93、106、108、437

Samarkand 21, 93, 106, 108, 437

圣22

San 22

贝鲁特的桑丘尼亚顿，腓尼基神话学家，公元72-73年

Sanchuniathon of Beirut, Phoenician mythographer 72-73

梵文20, 21, 24 n , 92, 174-176, 238

Sanskrit 20, 21, 24n, 92, 174-176, 238

在中亚和东亚 207-213

in Central and East Asia 207-213

佛教混合方言190

Buddhist Hybrid dialect 190

吟唱145 n

chants 145n

特征 180-185、194、205

characteristics 180-185, 194, 205

214-218年的魅力

charm of 214-218

以及中文192-194、209

and Chinese 192-194, 209

方言 175、189

dialects 175, 189

缺点 218-222

disadvantages 218-222

在戏剧188中

in drama 188

以及希腊语190-192

and Greek 190-192

在印度 185-190、195-199

in India 185-190, 195-199

礼仪经文 175-176、178-179、185、208、225、238、520、536

liturgical 175-176, 178-179, 185, 208, 225, 238, 520, 536

Prakrit 175, 178, 185, 187-188, 190, 192, 214, 218-219, 223, 246-247

发音 157、174 n、217

pronunciation 157, 174n, 217

宗教 189-190, 192

and religion 189-190, 192

脚本 174 n , 194, 202, 206, 209, 211

scripts 174n, 194, 202, 206, 209, 211

东南亚 4, 21, 159, 162, 199-207

in South-East Asia 4, 21, 159, 162, 199-207

说话人群 12

speaker populations 12

传播范围为 141、176-179、195-199、214、219、238

spread of 141, 176-179, 195-199, 214, 219, 238

取代了 212-213、574 n 38

supplanted 212-213, 574n38

222-226 的生存情况

survival of 222-226

经文 181-183

sutras 181-183

吠陀经/吠陀篇 43、175、180-181、185、197、206、209、220

Vedic/Vedas 43, 175, 180-181, 185, 197, 206, 209, 220

词汇表 183-184

vocabulary 183-184

文本183、194、209

written text 183, 194, 209

寂护，佛教僧侣，178

Śāntarak⋅ita, Buddhist monk 178

圣托马斯，弗雷·多明戈，西班牙修道士 334、356

Santo Tomás, Fray Domingo, Spanish friar 334, 356

萨卡拉 81

Saqqara 81

砂拉越 505

Sarawak 505

撒丁岛 45、71、76

Sardinia 45, 71, 76

阿卡德国王萨尔贡一世（公元35、37、40、51、60年）

Sargon I, king of Agade 35, 37, 40, 51, 60

亚述国王萨尔贡二世，公元前65年

Sargon II, king of Assyria 65

萨珊王朝 96、98、108、259、260

Sassanid dynasty 96, 98, 108, 259, 260

萨塔瓦哈纳，印度国王，公元189年

Satavahana, Indian king 189n

讽刺贸易156

Satire on Trades 156

Śaurasenī 188

撒克逊语，日耳曼语307

Saxon, Germanic language 307

撒克逊英格兰 312, 460

Saxon England 312, 460

入侵304-305，310-314

invasions 304-305, 310-314

Scaliger, Joseph Justus，荷兰语言学家 277 n

Scaliger, Joseph Justus, Dutch philologist 277n

斯堪的纳维亚 19、313、516

Scandinavia 19, 313, 516

席勒，弗里德里希，德国剧作家 446, 448

Schiller, Friedrich, German dramatist 446, 448

Schloezer, AL，德国语言学家 35 n

Schloezer, A.L., German philologist 35n

苏格兰 447 n , 463-464, 518

Scotland 447n, 463-464, 518

抄本 67、82、155-156

scribes 67, 82, 155-156

斯基尔斯，斯基泰希腊文化爱好者 243

Scyles, Scythian Hellenophile 243

斯基泰人48、108、186

Scythian 48, 108, 186

斯基泰人 43, 186, 219, 241, 243, 246, 257, 276, 335

Scythians 43, 186, 219, 241, 243, 246, 257, 276, 335

《蒙古秘史》 145

Secret History of the Mongols 145

塞琉西亚在《欧拉乌斯》258、561页，另见苏萨

Seleuceia on the Eulaeus 258, 561, see also Susa

底格里斯河畔的塞琉西亚 258, 561

Seleuceia on the Tigris 258, 561

塞琉古王朝 55, 108, 190, 191, 247, 248-249, 257, 258, 293

Seleucid dynasty 55, 108, 190, 191, 247, 248-249, 257, 258, 293

塞尔柱王朝 21、101、106、263、265

Seljuk dynasty 21, 101, 106, 263, 265

闪米特语系35, 36-38, 40, 41, 43, 47, 60-62, 65, 70, 72 n , 78, 93, 110-111, 122, 129, 250, 292, 517

Semitic languages 35, 36-38, 40, 41, 43, 47, 60-62, 65, 70, 72n, 78, 93, 110-111, 122, 129, 250, 292, 517

1-10 在阿卡德语、阿拉姆语和阿拉伯语中37 n , 38

1-10 in Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic 37n, 38

特征 35-37

characteristics 35-37

利奥波德·桑戈尔，塞内加尔总统 420

Senghor, Léopold, Senegalese president 420

亚述王西拿基立（公元50、65、83年）

Sennacherib, king of Assyria 50, 65, 83

七十士译本圣经248

Septuagint Bible 248

塞阔亚，切罗基 154

Sequoya, Cherokee 154

塞尔维亚 262

Serbia 262

塞尔维亚-克罗地亚语97 n

Serbo-Croat 97n

塞尔维亚人 430 n

Serbs 430n

塞提一世，法老126年

Seti I, pharaoh 126

苏尔皮修斯·西弗勒斯，罗马历史学家 300

Severus, Sulpicius, Roman historian 300

塞维利亚99

Seville 99

沙巴卡石碑（刻有孟菲斯神学） 113-114

Shabaka Stone (bearing Memphite theology) 113-114

莎士比亚，威廉，英国剧作家 22, 334, 473-474 n , 477

Shakespeare, William, English dramatist 22, 334, 473-474n, 477

尚朝118年、136年

Shāng dynasty 118, 136

上海149

Shanghai 149

Shem 35 n

Shem 35n

始皇帝，中国皇帝 137-138, 151, 156

Shi Huang Di, Chinese emperor 137-138, 151, 156

什叶派/什叶派传统 98

Shia/Shiite tradition 98

舍顺克王朝 127、129 年

Shoshenq dynasty 127, 129

许慎的秀恩介子138

Showen Jiezi of Xu Shen 138

Shusim 56另见Susa

Shusim 56 see also Susa

暹罗 207

Siam 207

西伯利亚 80、101、380、423、428、432、436、444-445

Siberia 80, 101, 380, 423, 428, 432, 436, 444-445

西西里岛 45, 71, 239-241

Sicily 45, 71, 239-241

悉达经文 156

Siddha script 156

Sidetic 84

西顿/西顿人 35 n , 44, 71

Sidon/Sidonians 35n, 44, 71

塞拉利昂 508

Sierra Leone 508

西哈努克、诺罗敦、柬埔寨王子 420

Sihanouk, Norodom, Cambodian prince 420

锡克教 216

Sikhism 216

西勒诺斯和索西洛斯，希腊编年史家，与汉尼拔一起，公元前77年

Silenos and Sosylos, Greek annalists with Hannibal 77

僧伽罗人 176另见 僧伽罗语

Simhala people 176 see also Sinhala

科尼利厄斯·扬·西蒙斯，389年锡兰荷兰总督

Simonsz, Cornelius Jan, Dutch governor of Ceylon 389

信德93

Sind 93

新加坡 149、505、507、532、548

Singapore 149, 505, 507, 532, 548

僧伽罗语198, 544

Sinhala 198, 544

中俄边界 427

Sino-Russian border 427

汉藏语系语言134、138、141

Sino-Tibetan languages 134, 138, 141

汉藏语系方言162

Sinoxenic dialects 162

奴隶贸易 105、344、365、391、415、416 n、418、480、508、539 n

Slave trade 105, 344, 365, 391, 415, 416n, 418, 480, 508, 539n

斯拉夫人 274、280-281、304-309、310、423

Slavs 274, 280-281, 304-309, 310, 423

入侵希腊 261-262、264、309、314

incursions into Greece 261-262, 264, 309, 314

斯拉夫语/斯拉夫语系262、273、275、277、309-310、422、425、429、447

Slavic/Slavonic languages 262, 273, 275, 277, 309-310, 422, 425, 429, 447

斯洛伐克人 430 n

Slovaks 430n

斯洛文尼亚人 430 n

Slovenians 430n

Slovo o Polku Igoreve，俄罗斯英雄 426

Slovo o Polku Igoreve, Russian heroic lay 426

史密斯，约翰船长，英国殖民者，公元前481年

Smith, Captain John, English colonist 481n

苏格拉底，古希腊哲学家，公元183年

Socrates, Greek philosopher 183

粟特语21, 48, 98-99, 106, 108, 546

Sogdian 21, 48, 98-99, 106, 108, 546

索玛，又名柳叶，扶南4的传奇女王

Soma, also Liuye, legendary queen of Funan 4

索马里 97 n , 104

Somalia 97n, 104

宋代142-143年、147年

Song dynasty 142-143, 147

宋云，中国朝圣者，193年

Song-Yun, Chinese pilgrim 193

儿子的书145

Son’s Books 145

埃尔南多·德·索托，西班牙征服者 337, 339, 344

Soto, Hernando de, Spanish conquistador 337, 339, 344

南非

South Africa

以及荷兰语399、411

and Dutch 399, 411

以及英语 19, 507

and English 19, 507

南美洲 12、333、362、419、444

South America 12, 333, 362, 419, 444

南太平洋 508

South Pacific 508

东南亚 101、159、160、178

South-East Asia 101, 159, 160, 178

以及英语506-507

and English 506-507

以及梵文199-213、536

and Sanskrit 199-213, 536

脚本 202-203

scripts 202-203

西班牙 14、14-16、332-346、347-350、478、482、486、494-495、509、519

Spain 14, 14-16, 332-346, 347-350, 478, 482, 486, 494-495, 509, 519

阿拉伯文字 97 n

Arabic script 97n

以及中国148

and China 148

基督教 332

and Christianity 332

帝国与语言 373-377

empire and language 373-377

以及法国410

and French 410

伊斯兰教禁止了333

Islam banned 333

犹太人被驱逐 333

Jews expelled 333

拉丁语12

and Latin 12

穆斯林人数 99-100，554

Muslim presence 99-100, 554

腓尼基人定居点 46 n , 71

Phoenician settlements 46n, 71

罗马控制 301

Roman control 301

另见美洲、加勒比海地区、菲律宾

see also Americas, Caribbean, Philippines

西班牙语7、179、300、307、331、340、373-377、472

Spanish 7, 179, 300, 307, 331, 340, 373-377, 472

卡斯蒂利亚语332-333

Castilian 332-333

殖民语言 325 n , 380, 400, 446, 495, 527-528

colonizing language 325n, 380, 400, 446, 495, 527-528

浪漫320 n，332

Romance 320n, 332

与纳瓦特尔语风格对比14-15

style contrasted with Nahuatl 14-15

世界语言 525-533

world language 525-533

美西战争 340, 377

Spanish-American War 340, 377

斯巴达 82、236、240

Sparta 82, 236, 240

斯波尔丁，奥古斯丁，英国商人 323

Spaulding, Augustine, British merchant 323

斯里兰卡 160, 176, 178, 199, 201, 389-391, 399, 401, 544

Śri Lanka 160, 176, 178, 199, 201, 389-391, 399, 401, 544

Śri Vijaya 147, 203

约瑟夫斯大林，苏联领导人 423 n , 432, 433 n

Stalin, Josef, Soviet leader 423n, 432, 433n

斯坦利，亨利爵士，英国探险家，418

Stanley, Sir Henry, British explorer 418

基尔肯尼法令 143 n，464-465

Statute of Kilkenny 143n, 464-465

斯特拉波，希腊地理学家 191, 232, 241, 252, 277, 279, 282, 335

Strabo, Greek geographer 191, 232, 241, 252, 277, 279, 282, 335

斯特拉斯堡誓词 308 n，317

Strasburg Oaths 308n, 317

Stuyvesant, Pieter，新荷兰最后任总督 493 n

Stuyvesant, Pieter, last governor of Nieuw Nederland 493n

苏丹98

Sudan 98

Suebi 305, 307

隋朝119年、141年

Súi dynasty 119, 141

沙利文，约翰·L.，美国记者 486

Sullivan, John L., US journalist 486

苏门答腊 147, 204-205, 213

Sumatra 147, 204-205, 213

萨默尔 31、37、39、41-44、51、53、57

Sumer 31, 37, 39, 41-44, 51, 53, 57

苏美尔语11 n , 32, 33, 37, 38, 41, 46, 49-56, 52, 55, 60-62, 68, 163, 536

Sumerian 11n, 32, 33, 37, 38, 41, 46, 49-56, 52, 55, 60-62, 68, 163, 536

与阿卡德语的双语现象51, 53-57, 111, 163

bilingualism with Akkadian 51, 53-57, 111, 163

楔形文字 11 n , 32, 37, 39-40, 40, 42, 46, 50, 51, 54-55, 57, 61-63, 72 n

cuneiform 11n, 32, 37, 39-40, 40, 42, 46, 50, 51, 54-55, 57, 61-63, 72n

edubba系统 62-63

edubba system 62-63

学校课本 37

school texts 37

Susa 56-57, 61, 258

šušan见Susa

šušan see Susa

斯瓦希里语97 n , 103-105, 419 n , 532

Swahili 97n, 103-105, 419n, 532

瑞典 410、433、486、492

Sweden 410, 433, 486, 492

瑞士 407、410

Switzerland 407, 410

叙利亚语87-88、90、131、250、255，另见 阿拉姆语

Syriac 87-88, 90, 131, 250, 255, see also Aramaic

叙利亚 20-21、37、38、44、48、79、86、128-129

Syria 20-21, 37, 38, 44, 48, 79, 86, 128-129

希腊的统治 245、247、259

Greek overlordship 245, 247, 259

叙利亚雅各派教会 90

Syrian Jacobite Church 90

塔布加奇 106, 119, 140, 144, 151, 153, 306 n

Tabgach 106, 119, 140, 144, 151, 153, 306n

塔西佗 273, 277, 280, 288, 302, 309, 311 n

Tacitus 273, 277, 280, 288, 302, 309, 311n

他加禄语377-379, 544

Tagalog 377-379, 544

泰语141

Tai languages 141

太宗，中国皇帝，公元159年

Tai Zong, Chinese emperor 159

台湾 451-453

Taiwan 451-453

塔吉克斯坦，47，99，108，437

Tajikistan, 47, 99, 108, 437

西努赫的故事，埃及浪漫史 129 n

Tale of Sinuhe, Egyptian romance 129n

《塔木德》 87、90 n、217

Talmud 87, 90n, 217

让·塔隆 (Talon, Jean)，新法兰西 414 总督

Talon, Jean, intendant of Nouvelle-France 414

塔马齐格特语127另见 柏柏尔语

Tamazight 127 see also Berber

泰米尔语160、177、198、201、507、530、544

Tamil 160, 177, 198, 201, 507, 530, 544

《塔纳赫》（希伯来圣经）70 n，96

TaNaK, Hebrew Scripture 70n, 96

唐朝 119、120、141、146、151、158、169、178、209 年

Tang dynasty 119, 120, 141, 146, 151, 158, 169, 178, 209

丹吉尔93

Tangier 93

西夏142

Tangut 142

塔尼斯 151

Tanis 151

坦桑尼亚 104-105, 508, 532, 544

Tanzania 104-105, 508, 532, 544

道教 172

Taoism 172

Tarascan 352、355、372

Tarascan 352, 355, 372

塔里克·本·齐亚德，摩尔人征服者，公元95年、99年

Tāriq bin Ziyād, Moorish conqueror 95, 99

塔尔特索斯人 290

Tartessians 290

鞑靼人 106, 306 n , 422, 423 n , 433, 434, 435, 440

Tatars 106, 306n, 422, 423n, 433, 434, 435, 440

塔克西拉 85、181、258

Taxila 85, 181, 258

远程地理学 544 n

TeleGeography 544n

泰卢固语 177、187、198、530

Telugu 177, 187, 198, 530

《暴风雨》（莎士比亚）334

Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 334

特波斯特兰 368

Tepoztlán 368

条顿骑士团 447

Teutonic knights 447

Tezozómoc，费尔南多·阿尔瓦拉多，纳瓦特尔编年史家 353-354

Tezozómoc, Fernando Alvarado, Nahuatl chronicler 353-354

泰语 134、141、208；脚本 202

Thai 134, 141, 208; script 202

泰国 147 n , 148, 161, 205, 208, 528

Thailand 147n, 148, 161, 205, 208, 528

《一千零一夜》第98、103章

The 1001 Nights 98, 103

底比斯 127、129、151

Thebes 127, 129, 151

地米斯托克利，希腊将军，公元前555年

Themistocles, Greek general 5, 555

三十六种策略171

Thirty-Six Strategems 171

托比，亨利，英属印度公务员 503 n

Thoby, Henry, British Indian civil servant 503n

色雷斯人 282, 290

Thracians 282, 290

修昔底德 233

Thucydides 233

西藏 80, 141, 178-179, 203, 221

Tibet 80, 141, 178-179, 203, 221

藏文21、134、209

Tibetan 21, 134, 209

脚本 156、211-212、564-565

script 156, 211-212, 564-565

藏缅语系语言177

Tibeto-Burman languages 177

亚述国王提格拉特帕拉沙尔一世，公元前43年、423年

Tiglath Pileser I, king of Assyria 43, 423n

亚述国王提格拉特帕拉沙尔三世，公元前65年

Tiglath Pileser III, king of Assyria 65

Tigre 36, 92

提格里尼亚语36, 92

Tigrinya 36, 92

底格里斯河 39、40北

Tigris 39, 40n

Timur-i-leng（帖木儿，帖木儿大帝），突厥征服者 90

Timur-i-leng (Tamerlane, Tamburlaine), Turkic conqueror 90

吐火罗人视贵霜

Tocharians see Kushāna

托干帖木儿，中国皇帝 143

Togan Timur, Chinese emperor 143

托克皮辛语508

Tok Pisin 508

德川家康，日本将军 388, 450

Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japanese shōgun 388, 450

托莱多 93、99

Toledo 93, 99

列夫·托尔斯泰伯爵，俄国作家，410、439

Tolstoy, Count Leo, Russian writer 410, 439

通京146

Tongking 146

排名前二十的语言 19 n , 525-533

Top Twenty Languages 19n, 525-533

《托拉》70 n，111，217

Torah, 70n, 111, 217

托里比奥·德·贝纳文特，弗雷·西·莫托利尼亚

Toribio de Benavente, Fray see Motolinía

Tordesillas 336-337、385 号线

Tordesillas line 336-337, 385

Torres, Luis de，西班牙语翻译 335

Torres, Luis de, Spanish interpreter 335

托托纳克348、352、355

Totonac 348, 352, 355

交易 10、21、56、61-62、74、75、128、130、146-149、154、213、229、242、313、326、334、357、363、385-387、391、397、402、412、416、441、444、450、511、547

Trade 10, 21, 56, 61-62, 74, 75, 128, 130, 146-149, 154, 213, 229, 242, 313, 326, 334, 357, 363, 385-387, 391, 397, 402, 412, 416, 441, 444, 450, 511, 547

“富人交易” 397

’Rich trades’ 397

图拉真，罗马皇帝，公元前259年，公元前310年

Trajan, Roman emperor 259n, 310

条约

Treaties

格奥尔基耶夫斯克 434

Georgievsk 434

涅尔琴斯克 427

Nerchinsk 427

巴黎 415、494

Paris 415, 494

拉施塔特 411

Rastatt 411

圣克莱尔叙埃普特 460

St-Clair-sur-Epte 460

托德西利亚斯 (Tardesilhas) 336-337, 385, 392

Tordesillas (Tardesilhas) 336-337, 385, 392

乌得勒支 414北

Utrecht 414n

怀唐伊506

Waitangi 506

约翰·特雷维萨 467, 468, 471

Trevisa, John de 467, 468, 471

特里亚顿，科普特诗歌134

Triadon, Coptic poem 134

爱尔兰三联体，（迈耶）272

Triads of Ireland, The (Meyer) 272

Trogodyte 131, 232

青柳纲太郎，日本政治分析家 453

Tsunataro, Aoyagi, Japanese political analyst 453

图阿雷格语101

Tuareg 101

Tunebo 363

通古斯语21、138、140、142、143

Tungus languages 21, 138, 140, 142, 143

突尼斯 93、97

Tunisia 93, 97

图皮瓜拉尼语362, 363

Tupí-Guaraní languages 362, 363

图皮南巴349-350, 363, 393, 571 n 15

Tupinambá 349-350, 363, 393, 571n15

突厥语系105-108、138、140、141、212、219、223 n、306 n、425、427、435、443 n 、 514、528 n

Turkic languages 105-108, 138, 140, 141, 212, 219, 223n, 306n, 425, 427, 435, 443n, 514, 528n

可能的通用语 531, 547

possible lingua franca 531, 547

卢恩字母表 106

runic alphabet 106

脚本 106

scripts 106

土库曼斯坦 437, 443 n

Turkmenistan 437, 443n

土耳其人

Turks

横跨安纳托利亚/爱琴海 264

advance across Anatolia/Aegean 264

以及阿拉伯语入门101

and Arabic 101

基督教正统派 264, 269-270

Christian Orthodoxy 264, 269-270

土耳其征服 263-265 年，528年

Turkish conquests 263-265, 528n

土耳其语21, 97 n , 105 n , 108, 163, 263, 547, 554

Turkish 21, 97n, 105n, 108, 163, 263, 547, 554

廷代尔，威廉 473

Tyndale, William 473

轮胎 44、68 n、71、73、75、250

Tyre 44, 68n, 71, 73, 75, 250

Tz'utujil 372

Tz’utujil 372

乌干达 105,508

Uganda 105, 508

乌加里特 41、60 n、62、71、128

Ugarit 41, 60n, 62, 71, 128

乌加里特语70、71、73

Ugaritic 70, 71, 73

维吾尔语21, 97 n , 107, 142

Uighur 21, 97n, 107, 142

脚本 106

script 106

乌克兰 425、429、431-432、439、443

Ukraine 425, 429, 431-432, 439, 443

乌尔比安，罗马律师，公元299年

Ulpian, Roman lawyer 299

'乌玛尔·伊本·哈塔卜，阿拉伯评论家 94

’Umar ibn al-Khattab, Arab critic 94

翁布里亚242

Umbrian 242

联合东印度公司 (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie -VOC) 397, 400 n , 401-102, 457, 539

United East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie -VOC) 397, 400n, 401-102, 457, 539

英国，人口153

United Kingdom, population 153n

美国杂志486期

United States Magazine 486

Ur 40, 67

乌拉尔/乌拉尔地区至俄罗斯东北部 423, 432

Uralian/Uralic area to Russia’s North-East 423, 432

乌拉尔语系429

Uralic languages 429

乌拉尔图 31, 33, 41, 43, 46-47, 50, 65

Urartu 31, 33, 41, 43, 46-47, 50, 65

乌尔都语12、178、223、497-498、503、528-530；另见 印地语

Urdu 12, 178, 223, 497-498, 503, 528-530; see also Hindi

Urfa 87, 247

乌鲁克 54

Uruk 54

美国托管地太平洋岛屿 454 n

US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands 454n

美国

USA

非裔美国人白话英语 (AAVE) 514

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) 514

美国革命 486-487

American Revolution 486-487

吞并各州 488、494-495、509-510

annexation of states 488, 494-495, 509-510

和澳大利亚英语514 n

and Australian English 514n

以及中国147

and China 147

人口统计数据 531

demographics 531

经济 379

economy 379

通用美式发音 81,514

General American pronunciation 81, 514

西班牙裔人口 378 n

Hispanic population 378n

移民 535

immigration 535

土著人口 488-490

indigenous population 488-490

514-515年的影响

influence of 514-515

人口 153 n

population 153n

以及西班牙语378

and Spanish 378

英语传播489、549、577 n 9

spread of English 489, 549, 577n9

乌托-阿兹特克语系351

Uto-Aztecan languages 351

Uwa see Tunebo

乌兹别克斯坦 423号、437 号、443号、547 号

Uzbekistan 423n, 437, 443n, 547

弗朗索瓦·瓦伦泰恩，荷兰作家 401

Valentijn, François, Dutch writer 401

瓦莱拉，布拉斯神父，秘鲁的西班牙神父 345、357-358、360、365

Valera, Father Blas, Spanish priest in Peru 345, 357-358, 360, 365

Valla, Lorenzo，意大利人文主义者 27

Valla, Lorenzo, Italian humanist 27

瓦尔韦德，弗雷·维森特，西班牙修士 342

Valverde, Fray Vicente, Spanish friar 342

破坏者 20、275、305、307、309、332 n、400

Vandals 20, 275, 305, 307, 309, 332n, 400

瓦努阿图 508

Vanuatu 508

瓦兰吉人视维京人

Varangians see Vikings

吠陀经 175

Veda 175

Vega, Garcilaso de la，秘鲁作家 342-343, 344-345, 356, 360

Vega, Garcilaso de la, Peruvian writer 342-343, 344-345, 356, 360

维加，洛佩·德，西班牙剧作家 344

Vega, Lope de, Spanish dramatist 344

可敬的贝德，英国僧侣，31岁

Venerable Bede, English monk 31n

Veneti 280-281, 290, 309, 423另见Slavs

Veneti 280-281, 290, 309, 423 see also Slavs

维钦托列克斯 301

Vercingetorix 301

维吉尔，罗马诗人，公元253年

Vergil, Roman poet 253

维埃拉，安东尼奥神父，葡萄牙神父 392

Vieira, Father Antonio, Portuguese priest 392

越南 46n 、 138、146、162、204-205、207、529

Vietnam 46n, 138, 146, 162, 204-205, 207, 529

葡萄牙贸易站 387

Portuguese trading posts 387

印度支那联盟417

Union indochinoise 417

越南语145 n , 528

Vietnamese 145n, 528

国语（罗马化拼写）414 n

Quôc-ngu (’National Language’, romanized script) 414n

中越语162-163

Sino-Vietnamese 162-163

维京人 312、425、426 n、447 n、460

Vikings 312, 425, 426n, 447n, 460

西哥特人 101 n , 275, 305-307, 310

Visigoths 101n, 275, 305-307, 310

瓦拉几亚游牧民族 310

Vlach nomads 310

VOC指的是联合东印度公司

VOC see United East India Company

伏尔泰（François-Marie Arouet），法国作家410

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), French writer 410

武加大圣经294

Vulgate bible 294

韦斯，罗伯特 459

Wace, Robert 459

威妥玛拼音对汉语115n的罗马化

Wade-Giles romanization of Chinese 115n

等待野蛮人（卡瓦菲斯）228

Waiting for the Barbarians (Kavafis) 228

威尔士

Wales

以及公元463年和518年的诺曼入侵

and Norman invasions 463, 518

瘟疫313

plague 313

威尔士语93, 270 n , 274, 300, 303, 464, 473 n , 517

Welsh 93, 270n, 274, 300, 303, 464, 473n, 517

考文垂的沃尔特，英国作家，463

Walter of Coventry, English writer 463

《战争与和平》（托尔斯泰）410

War and Peace (Tolstoy) 410

华盛顿，乔治，美国总统，第498任

Washington, George, US President 498

魏朝140年，参见塔布加奇

Wèi dynasty 140 see Tabgach

韦尔斯利，理查德，英国孟加拉总督 498

Wellesley, Richard, British governor-general of Bengal 498

Wends 430北

Wends 430n

温德利，格奥尔格·亨里克，《圣经》马来语译者 402

Wemdly, Georg Henrik, translator of Bible into Malay 402

西亚 46-49

West Asia 46-49

西印度公司（Westindische Compagnie—WIC）397-398, 493

West India Company (Westindische Compagnie—WIC) 397-398, 493

惠特曼，沃尔特，美国诗人 474 n

Whitman, Walt, American poet 474n

威尔伯福斯，威廉，英国活动家 501

Wilberforce, William, British campaigner 501

威廉一世（征服者威廉），英格兰诺曼国王，公元319年、460年

William the Bastard (the Conqueror), Norman king of England 319, 460

威廉姆斯，罗杰，英国语言学家，480-481，484-485

Williams, Roger, British linguist 480-481, 484-485

维特根斯坦，路德维希，奥地利哲学家 13, 549

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Austrian philosopher 13, 549

妇女演讲 51-53

Women’s speech 51-53

世界年鉴378

World Almanac 378

写作

Writing

会计统计结果为154

accounting tallies 154

字母文字 63-64, 67

alphabetic script 63-64, 67

大写字母，大写与小写 316 n

capitals, upper- vs lower-case 316n

楔形文字 11 n , 32, 37, 40, 42, 46, 50, 51, 54-55, 57, 61-63, 72 n , 512

cuneiform 11n, 32, 37, 40, 42, 46, 50, 51, 54-55, 57, 61-63, 72n, 512

已知最早的记录是 34,110

earliest known 34, 110

象形文字 11 n , 34, 113-116, 121, 124-125, 128, 132-133, 154-158, 173

hieroglyphs 11n, 34, 113-116, 121, 124-125, 128, 132-133, 154-158, 173

表意文字系统，46 n的字符，54，154-158

ideographic systems, character of 46n, 54, 154-158

日语假名音节表 116

Japanese kana syllabary 116

表意符号 37、62

logograms 37, 62

材料 63、67、78、83、97、135 n

materials 63, 67, 78, 83, 97, 135n

象形图 51、56、113-116、132、135、156、157

pictograms 51, 56, 113-116, 132, 135, 156, 157

抄写员 67

scribes 67

速记符号 46

shorthand symbols 46

音节表 47, 56, 154, 156

syllabary 47, 56, 154, 156

吴帝皇，中国皇后，151年，169年

Wu, Chinese empress 151n, 169

武宗，中国皇帝，公元120年

Wu Zong, Chinese emperor 120

约翰·威克里夫，英文译者 473

Wyclif, John, English translator 473

温德姆，托马斯，英国旅行家 388

Wyndham, Thomas, English traveller 388

薛西斯，波斯国王，公元68年、85年

Xerxes, king of Persia 68, 85

夏朝118年

Xià dynasty 118

满语锡伯话144

Xibo dialect of Manchu 144

湘女 106, 139-140, 144, 153, 219

Xiāngnú 106, 139-140, 144, 153, 219

玄奘，中国僧侣 120, 138 n , 159, 193-194, 198, 221

Xuan-Zang, Chinese pilgrim 120, 138n, 159, 193-194, 198, 221

雅格诺比108

Yaghnobi 108

耶鲁大学对中文的罗马化处理 115 n , 497 n

Yale romanization of Chinese 115n, 497n

燕国140

Yan kingdom 140

易134, 145 n

Yi 134, 145n

易经，中国朝圣者 193-194, 201

Yi Jing, Chinese pilgrim 193-194, 201

《易经》 154

Yì Jīng (Classic of Changes) 154

易宗，中国皇帝158

Yi Zong, Chinese emperorl58

意第绪语442

Yiddish 442

横田348

Yokot’an 348

约鲁巴语 530

Yoruba 530

元朝 121、141、143、146、147 年

Yuán dynasty 121, 141, 143, 146, 147

尤卡坦玛雅1,348

Yucatec Maya 1, 348

粤语（粤语）是汉语的一种方言，参考文献136、141、147、528。

Yuè (Cantonese) dialect of Chinese 136, 141, 147, 528

月氏见拘尸那

Yuezhi see Kushāna

南斯拉夫 310

Yugoslavia 310

Yuta-Nawan 语言参见Uto-Aztecan

Yuta-Nawan languages see Uto-Aztecan

扎卡尔-巴尔，比布鲁斯国王，公元71年

Zakar-baal, king of Byblos 71

赞比亚 507

Zambia 507

桑给巴尔 104-105

Zanzibar 104-105

萨帕塔，胡安·文图拉，纳瓦特尔语剧作家 368

Zapata, Juan Ventura, Nahuatl dramatist 368

萨波特克 348、352、355

Zapotec 348, 352, 355

Zend-Avesta 31

赵国140年

Zhao kingdom 140

郑和，中国海军将领 147, 160-161, 339

Zheng-he, Chinese admiral 147, 160-161, 339

中国（中国）167

Zhōng-guo (China) 167

赵朝 118、136 年

Zhāu dynasty 118, 136

庄134，141

Zhuang 134, 141

庄子，中国圣人 150

Zhuang-zi, Chinese sage 150

津巴布韦 507

Zimbabwe 507

Zirids 100

琐罗亚斯德教徒 48、96、98、141、158、537

Zoroastrians 48, 96, 98, 141, 158, 537

致谢

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

本书的最初灵感来自巴斯文化协会BRLSI的约翰·科茨；他邀请我为“未来史”千禧年系列讲座做一场关于语言的演讲。直到我坐下来研究几种主要语言的历史时，我才意识到这引出了一个多么广阔而重要的主题，然而这个主题却在大众认知中被严重忽略。

The first seed for this book came from John Coates of BRLSI, Bath’s cultural society; he invited me to give a lecture on language, as part of a millennium series on ‘Histories of the Future’. Only when I sat down to consider the histories of a few major languages, did I realise what a vast and important theme this opened up, yet one that was largely omitted from general knowledge.

洛拉·布博什 (Lola Bubbosh) 指引我迈入文学经纪人的世界。在那里，我很幸运地遇到了娜塔莎·费尔韦瑟 (Natasha Fairweather)，她能看出如何才能最好地向出版商呈现我的主题。除此之外，她还指出了一些其他作品，丰富了我对主题的理解。正是由于她，以及我那些眼光敏锐、乐于助人的编辑——理查德·约翰逊 (Richard Johnson)、安德鲁·普罗克特 (Andrew Proctor) 和特里·卡滕 (Terry Karten)，我的出版处女作才如此顺利。他们的同事们也以不同的方式让我惊叹不已——在AP Watt出版社，琳达·肖内西 (Linda Shaughnessy) 在我还没动笔之前就已将翻译版权销往世界各地；在哈珀柯林斯出版社，凯特·海德 (Kate Hyde) 应对着来自四面八方的前所未有的素材；还有英国和美国的封面设计师多米尼克·福布斯 (Dominic Forbes) 和罗伯托·德·维克 (Roberto de Vicq)。还有一些更亲近的人，他们为我的早期草稿提出了严厉而有益的批评，包括我的女儿索菲亚 (Sophia)、我的岳父大卫·西森 (David Thesen)、我的妻子，以及最重要的文学顾问简·邓恩 (Jane Dunn)。他们发现的缺点——正如他们善意地认为的那样——并非源于我思想过于深奥，而是源于我表达方式过于晦涩。无论如何，他们的努力让其他人更容易理解我一直以来所理解的。

Lola Bubbosh guided my first steps into the world of literary agents. There I was fortunate to find Natasha Fairweather, who could see how best to present my theme to publishers. Besides that, she pointed out other works which have enriched my own understanding of it. It is thanks to her, and my perceptive and conducive editors, Richard Johnson, Andrew Proctor and Terry Karten, that my first foray into publishing has been so straightforward. Colleagues of theirs have also amazed me in different ways—at A. P. Watt Linda Shaughnessy selling translation rights across the world before I had even written a word; and at HarperCollins Kate Hyde coping with unprecedented material coming from all sides, and the UK and US cover-designers Dominic Forbes and Roberto de Vicq. Others closer to home gave stern but helpful criticism on early drafts, my daughter Sophia, my father-in-law David Thesen, above all my wife, and prime literary consultant, Jane Dunn. The faults that they found were not—as they charitably thought—the result of my being too deep, but just of my being too opaque. At any rate, their efforts have made it much easier for others to see what I have been getting at all along.

至于写作过程中所受到的学术帮助，我得到了世界各地学者的帮助，他们抽出时间，慷慨地澄清了他们在语言方面比我精通得多的细节：Ghil'ad Zuckermann、Geoffrey Khan（阿卡德语和阿拉米语）；Rashad Ahmad Azami（阿拉伯语）；Hassan Ouzzate、Salem Mezhoud（柏柏尔语）；Abdou Elimam（布匿语）；Christopher Child（斯瓦希里语）；E. Bruce Brooks（汉语）；Harekrishna Satpathy、Radha Madhav Dash、Sanghamitra Mohanty、Prativa Manjari Ralt（梵语）；Ether Soselia（格鲁吉亚语）；María Stella González de Perez（西班牙语和葡萄牙语）；Frances Karttunen（纳瓦特尔语）；Aurolyn Luykx（克丘亚语）；Emma Volodarskaya（俄语）和David Crystal（英语）。安迪·波利和达雷尔·特赖恩加深了我对太平洋地区语言的了解，奥托·兹瓦特杰斯、埃文·霍夫德豪根和弗朗索瓦丝·杜埃则拓展了我对欧洲和中东语言研究的认知。尤其要感谢彼得·T·丹尼尔斯，他不仅凭借其在阿拉姆语和中东语言方面的深厚专业知识使我受益匪浅，更以细致的阅读和一丝不苟的排版（甚至包括楔形文字）等多方面改进了整部文本。其他审阅并纠正错误的读者包括弗兰克·阿巴特、巴特·霍兰德、丹·休斯、蒂姆·瑙、杉森纪子、马克·图林，以及最重要的斯蒂芬·本汉姆和弗兰·卡图宁。我衷心感谢他们所有人。但毋庸置疑，文中仍存在一些错误，我对此负有责任。

As for intellectual debts while writing, I have been aided by scholars all over the world, who have given of their time and generously clarified details of languages in which they were far more learned than I: Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Geoffrey Khan (Akkadian and Aramaic); Rashad Ahmad Azami (Arabic); Hassan Ouzzate, Salem Mezhoud (Berber); Abdou Elimam (Punic); Christopher Child (Swahili); E. Bruce Brooks (Chinese); Harekrishna Satpathy, Radha Madhav Dash, Sanghamitra Mohanty, Prativa Manjari Ralt (Sanskrit), Ether Soselia (Georgian), María Stella González de Perez (Spanish and Portuguese), Frances Karttunen (Nahuatl), Aurolyn Luykx (Quechua), Emma Volodarskaya (Russian) and David Crystal (English). Andy Pawley and Darrell Tryon have sharpened my knowledge of languages in the Pacific, and Otto Zwartjes, Even Hovdhaugen and Françoise Douay of language studies in Europe and the Middle East. Above all, Peter T. Daniels, after benefiting me with his profound expertise in Aramaic and Middle-Eastern languages, has gone on to improve the whole text in a variety of ways both as attentive reader and punctilious typesetter, even unto cuneiform. Other readers who have corrected errors include Frank Abate, Bart Holland, Dan Hughes, Tim Nau, Noriko Akimoto Sugimori, Mark Turin and most of all Stephen Benham and Fran Karttunen. I am sincerely grateful to them all. But needless to say, I am still responsible for mistakes that remain.

完成本书的学术历程也让我受益匪浅。最近，我要特别感谢托尼·麦克纳里，是他促成了我2001年的印度之行；还要感谢简·辛普森和大卫·纳什，在他们二十五年来对语言和理论的交流与启发之后，他们让我得以在2002年访问澳大利亚。这片现代语言学的摇篮拥有丰富的语言数据，在那里，我得以在珀斯、悉尼和阿米代尔向博学而又充满热情的听众们展示这些研究成果。此外，我还要感谢约翰·亨德森和尼克·里德，感谢他们的盛情邀请和热情款待。

The intellectual journey to complete this book has incurred other debts. Most recently, my debts are to Tony McEnery, who conjured up my trips to India in 2001; and to Jane Simpson and David Nash, who—after twenty-five years of shared insights about languages and theories—made it possible for me in 2002 to visit Australia. That dawn-land of today’s linguistics has access to the great feed-stocks of language data, and there I could present this material to audiences of the learned and enthusiastic in Perth, Sydney and Armidale. Among them I have John Henderson and Nick Reid to thank too, for invitations and memorable hospitality.

更远一些，但同样重要的是，我在这里积累的背景知识来自众多语言教师：我特别想到了 Maurice Bickmore、Bella Thompson、Ken Batterby、James Howarth、Geoffrey Allibone、Jack Ind、Robert Ogilvie、Jasper Griffin、Peter Parsons、Oliver Gurney、Anna Morpurgo Davies、Wayne O'Neil、Paul Kiparsky、Ken Hale、Daniel Ingalls、Rama Nath Sharma、Susumu Kuno、Bart Matthias、Edwin Cranston、Rosalind Howard、Martin Prechtel、Damian McManus、Kim McCone 和 Stiofáin Ó Direáin。

More distantly, but no less importantly, the background knowledge harvested here has come to me from a long and varied line of language teachers: I think particularly of Maurice Bickmore, Bella Thompson, Ken Batterby, James Howarth, Geoffrey Allibone, Jack Ind, Robert Ogilvie, Jasper Griffin, Peter Parsons, Oliver Gurney, Anna Morpurgo Davies, Wayne O’Neil, Paul Kiparsky, Ken Hale, Daniel Ingalls, Rama Nath Sharma, Susumu Kuno, Bart Matthias, Edwin Cranston, Rosalind Howard, Martin Prechtel, Damian McManus, Kim McCone and Stiofáin Ó Direáin.

这些指南就像先知。在我国，语言教学常常被误解为一种徒劳无功的苦差事；而学习一门外语的确常常看似一项几乎不可能完成的任务。通往成功的道路上没有捷径，但沿途却处处闪耀着意想不到的光芒。对我而言，这始终是通往超越我想象的新世界的最可靠途径，正如“通往星辰大海”（sic ITVR AD ASTRA）所言。

These guides are like prophets. In our country language teaching is often misrepresented as misguided drudgery; and really to learn another language can often seem a nigh impossible task. There is no royal road to it, but gold glints in unexpected places all along the path. For me it has always been the surest route to new worlds that lie beyond my imagination, sic ITVR AD ASTRA.

作者简介

About the Author

尼古拉斯·奥斯特勒对语言的浓厚兴趣，使他从牛津大学古典学一级荣誉学位和麻省理工学院语言学与梵语博士学位起步，之后赴日本任教，并参与了从克里特岛到新墨西哥州的一系列研究项目，旨在将语言引入计算机。随后，他转向研究人类语言的问题，并成为古代南美洲奇布查语的专家。奇布查语在十八世纪被西班牙语取代。

NICHOLAS OSTLER’S serious interest in languages took him from first-class honors in Classics at Oxford and a doctorate in linguistics and Sanskrit at MIT to teaching in Japan and a succession of research projects from Crete to New Mexico, aimed at introducing languages to computers. He then moved on to the problems of human speakers and made himself an expert on the Chibcha language of ancient South America, which yielded to Spanish in the eighteenth century.

尼古拉斯·奥斯特勒是濒危语言基金会（www.ogmios.org）的主席，该基金会是一家慈善机构，致力于支持世界各地的小型社区更好地了解和使用他们的语言。他居住在英国巴斯。

Nicholas Ostler is chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages (www.ogmios.org), a charity that supports the efforts of small communities worldwide to know and use their languages more. He lives in Bath, England.

访问 www.AuthorTracker.com 获取您最喜欢的哈珀柯林斯出版社作者的独家信息。

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图片来源

PICTURE CREDITS

32-33, 202 文本样本和译文出自 Daniels, Peter & William Bright (1996), The World's Writing Systems , New York: Oxford University Press. Copyright $cP 1996 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

32-33, 202 Text specimens and translations from Daniels, Peter & William Bright (1996), The World’s Writing Systems, New York: Oxford University Press. Copyright $cP 1996 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

285-287 来自皮埃尔·伊夫·兰伯特 (1997)，《La Langue Gauloise》，巴黎：Errance 版本

285-287 From Lambert, Pierre-Yves (1997), La Langue Gauloise, Paris: Editions Errance

All reasonable efforts have been made by the author and publisher to trace copyright holders of the materials featured in this book. In the event that the author or publisher are contacted by any of the untraceable copyright holders after the publication of this book, the author and publisher will endeavour to rectify the position accordingly.

对《文字帝国》的赞誉

PRAISE FOR Empires of the Word

“就我所知，本书涵盖的领域比任何其他单卷作品都更加奔放不羁，其幽默感也远超我们对如此雄心壮志的预期，并且对作品的诗意表达有着绝妙的把握。”

“Covers more rambunctious territory than any other single volume I’m aware of, with greater wit than we’ve a right to expect in the service of such ambition, and a wonderful ear for the project’s poetry.”

——约翰·伦纳德，《哈珀斯》杂志

—John Leonard, Harper’s

“这是一部意义非凡的新书……奥斯特勒提供了许多新颖的见解、有用的历史轶事和迷人的语言学奇闻……他对世界历史上主要语言的全面概述，使英语目前在全球的传播有了更清晰的认识。”

“[A] monumental new book…. Ostler furnishes many fresh insights, useful historical anecdotes, and charming linguistic oddities…. His massive overview of major languages in world history puts the current global spread of English in perspective.”

—— 《芝加哥论坛报》

—Chicago Tribune

“变量如此之多，历史先例又如此矛盾，我们所能做的也只有提出问题。奥斯特勒做到了这一点，他以真正学者应有的清晰思路和谦逊态度阐述了这些问题。这是一本精彩绝伦、博学而又富有启发性的著作。”

“The variables are so many, and the historical precedents so contradictory, one can do little more than pose the questions. This Ostler does, with all the clarity and humility of true scholarship. A marvelous book, learned and instructive.”

— 《国家评论》

—National Review

《语言帝国》讲述了一个充满戏剧性逆转和令人费解的悖论的故事。这是一部内容丰富的作品，其中包含许多精辟的见解和惊人的对比。

“Empires of the Word is a story of dramatic reversals and puzzling paradoxes. A rich … text with many piercing observations and startling comparisons.”

—— 《洛杉矶时报》书评

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“具有革命性意义……这不仅仅是雄心勃勃：这是一项浩大的工程，其学术深度令人叹为观止，但细节却又不会过于繁复，以至于让普通读者感到不知所措。”

“Revolutionary…. This is more than ambitious: it’s a colossal undertaking, executed with a giddying depth of scholarship, yet the detail is never too thick to swamp the general reader.”

—— 《波士顿杂志》

—Boston magazine

“这是一部博学之作，概述了世界主要语言，从幼发拉底河流域的苏美尔人开始，一直到英语的当代霸权结束。”

“A work of immense erudition, surveying the world’s major languages, starting with the Sumerians of the Euphrates valley and concluding with the contemporary hegemony of English.”

— 《基督教科学箴言报》

—Christian Science Monitor

“[奥斯特勒]对世界语言进行了广泛的历史考察……他以精辟的见解提出问题，并提供答案或理论。”

“[A] wide-ranging history of the world’s languages…. [Ostler] brilliantly raises questions and supplies answers or theories.”

—— 《华盛顿邮报》

—Washington Post

“精彩！很少有语言学书籍能解答人们真正向语言学家提出的问题，例如为什么有些语言有数百万人使用，而有些语言只有几百人使用。奥斯特勒的这本书揭示了某些幸运的语言是如何随着人类的迁徙遍布全球的，其中许多语言最终消失得无影无踪，而其中一种——你猜是哪种？——如今却主宰着世界。”

“Delicious! Few books on language answer the questions that people actually ask linguists, such as why some languages are spoken by millions and others by just a few hundred. Ostler’s book shows how certain lucky languages joined humankind in its spread across the world, many of them eventually vanishing without a trace, and one of them—guess which?—currently ruling the planet.”

——约翰·麦克沃特

—John McWhorter

“洞见非凡……闪耀着深奥的知识、敏锐的洞察力和新颖的理念……我实在想不出还有哪本书能比它更好地诠释欧亚大陆（从苏美尔语开始）乃至后哥伦布时期的全球语言史。其分析之宏大令人叹为观止……如此巨著，唯有博学多识、胆识过人者方能写出。”

“Daring insight…. Sparkles with arcane knowledge, shrewd perceptions, and fresh ideas…. I can’t think of a volume that has better interpreted the linguistic history of Eurasia, from Sumerian onwards, or of the entire world in the post-Columbian era. The sheer sweep of his analysis is breathtaking … A book such as this could only have been written by someone of considerable audacity as well as erudition.”

—— 《泰晤士报文学副刊》

—Times Literary Supplement

“发人深省……总是具有挑战性，总是富有启发性——有时甚至令人震惊或具有革命性。”

“Enlightening…. Always challenging, always instructive—at times, even startling or revolutionary.”

—— 《科克斯书评》

—Kirkus Reviews

“很少有书能像这本书一样，给语言学习带来如此多的乐趣。”

“Few books bring more excitement to the study of language.”

— 《书单》（星级评论）

—Booklist (starred review)

“奥斯特勒的新历史著作不仅关注社会，也关注他们所使用的语言……贯穿全书的一个重要教训是，征服和经济实力都不能保证一种语言的生存。”

“Ostler’s new history is as much about societies as it is about the languages they speak…. One of the lessons that shines through the book is that neither conquest nor economic might guarantees a language’s survival.”

—— 《经济学人》

—The Economist

“内容宏大且通俗易懂……这本引人入胜的书以语言的传播和消亡为视角，讲述了世界历史。”

“Ambitious and accessible…. This stimulating book is a history of the world as seen through the spread and demise of languages.”

—— 《出版商周刊》

—Publishers Weekly

“本书对历史上帝国语言的影响进行了精辟的比较分析……奥斯特勒的文笔简洁而引人入胜，展现了他对语言史的深刻理解……任何对语言感兴趣的人都能读懂这本书。”

“A masterly comparative analysis of empires’ linguistic effects throughout history…. Ostler writes in a concise yet engaging manner, displaying an impressive grasp of the history of languages…. This book is accessible to anyone with an interest in language.”

—— 《图书馆杂志》

—Library Journal

版权

Copyright

本书于 2005 年由英国哈珀柯林斯出版社首次出版。

First published in Great Britain in 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers.

美国第一版于 2005 年由哈珀柯林斯出版社出版。

First U.S. edition published in 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

哈珀出版社首版， 2006年出版。

FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION published 2006.

美国国会图书馆对精装版的编目如下：

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

奥斯特勒，尼古拉斯。

《语言帝国：世界语言史》/

尼古拉斯·奥斯特勒著。——美国第一版。

页数：厘米。

包含参考文献和索引。ISBN

0-06-621086-0

1. 语言与语言——历史。I. 标题。

Ostler, Nicholas.

Empires of the word : a language history of the world /

Nicholas Ostler.—1st American ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-06-621086-0

1. Language and languages—History. I. Title.

P107.088 2005

409—dc22 2005046010

ISBN-10: 0-06-093572-3 (pbk.)

ISBN-13: 978-0-06-093572-6 (pbk.)

06 07 08 09 10 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

关于出版商

About the Publisher

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内容

CONTENTS

一段内在的历史

An inward history too

社会的

SOCIAL

政治的

POLITICAL

宗教

RELIGIOUS

希腊人

THE GREEKS

中国人

THE CHINESE

6三千年唯我论：希腊的冒险

6Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek

6

三千年唯我论：希腊的冒险

6

Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek